I just finished skinning the last of this year's harvest for me, altogether 3 deer and 3 antelope. The bucks were young, all of the does were dry. The two doe deer were from the mountains, the rest were from the desert. Not one of the six had a normal layer of fat. When I skin small bucks and dry does I expect at least about 1/4" of fat over the pelvis, often there is much more.
What is different this year? Folks who believe that nature has mysterious ways that we can't understand may say that we will have a non-winter this year. So far we have had a beautiful warm open fall.
Others who believe there is an answer for everything would look at the past summer and try to make sense of it. This was an unusual summer. Spring was cold and wet, but summer was very dry. Here at Shoshoni, we had no measurable precipitation all summer. Fall continues to be dry.
I think that there may have been another factor. We had a grasshopper plague "of Biblical prorportions" last summer. When you walked they got up in waves. They didn't attack all vegetation uniformly, aound my place they completely denuded my young apple trees and even ate the bark off the new years growth, while leaving some young plantings like native plums almost untouched. Did the grasshoppers eat all the "deer" food last summer?
Whatever went on, whenever it gets cold and nasty this winter I will be feeling sorry for the poor critters out there toughing it out without any fat reserves. I hope we don't have big die offs.
