Let’s see:

– Archery season here in Michigan starts in less than 24 hours.

– My main hunting spot has a soybean field that had some tiling problems this year and remains fully green.

– Stands are hung all around.

– Deer are plentiful, and there have been regular evening appearances by a trio of nice bucks.

– Their leader is a monster 14-point who has a tantalizing habit of showing up right around the same corner of the beans every evening.

– The forecast that was calling for the exact wrong wind has changed in my favor.

– Tomorrow I will hang a stand as close as I can bear to where that big boy shows himself. I believe I will have one chance at him before he wises up.

– Game on.

– Good luck!

Not in Michigan, you haven’t.

There’s an e-mail circulating about a grocery store manager in Mesick, Michigan, who shot and killed a cougar that had attacked his dogs. With it are several pictures of the cat, the manager, and even a conservation officer.

The latter is how this proved to be phony. If you hunt or fish in Michigan, you know that green is a very prominent color in the uniform of a Michigan CO. Style comments aside, the pants they wear are green, the shirts dark gray. The caps are black, but the large print on the front is very green.

Look at this CO. See any green on his uniform? The black pants, light gray shirt and green-free cap give him away. He is not one of ours.

A Traverse City television station reports that officer is from New Mexico, and that the story is mostly true.

It just didn’t happen in Michigan.

Let’s hear it for Wayne Schumacher of Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin, who arrowed this 30-point anything-but-typical beast from 15 yards near Rosedale, Wis.

According the Associated Press, the deer field-dressed out to 225 pounds and had an inside spread of 20.5 inches. That’s an AP photo as well.

Lake herring may not mean much to you, but don’t be fooled. Some Michigan fisheries biologists say the species could go a long way toward righting what’s wrong with Lake Huron. Unfortunately, budget woes and a glacial bureaucracy are conspiring against innovation in this case.

Let’s review:

Earlier this decade, invading quagga mussels colonized the deeper parts of Lake Huron and filtered out the microscopic plant and animal matter in the middle of the lake. That starved out the little shrimp-like crustaceans who ate those small particles. When the crustaceans died off, that left smaller fish like alewives – another invasive that became a vital part of the lake’s ecology – with nothing to eat. At the same time, millions of stocked chinook salmon began spontaneously reproducing in undammed Canadian rivers that dump into Lake Huron. After several record years of salmon fishing in Lake Huron, the hungry hordes of salmon decimated the already-struggling alewives, thus eating themselves out of house and home.

Today the alewives are gone and so, for the most part, are the salmon. Michigan still stocks 1.5 million chinooks every year, but the data show that most of the salmon are dumped in the lake only to be eaten by the remaining predators. Walleyes and lake trout appear to be recovering — it turned out having alewives around was bad for them — but they’re eating desirable things like baby lake trout, yellow perch and yes, chinook salmon smolts.

Which brings us to lake herring, a native species that once roamed Lake Huron in huge numbers, feeding predators and filling the niche — pelagic planktivore by name — that alewives took over and then left empty. For reasons no one really knows, lake herring vanished from much of Lake Huron. The remaining herring could re-colonize Lake Huron, but the problem is they’re homers. They spawn where they were born, which means they aren’t really programmed to strike out for new territory.

So some smart scientists got the idea that if you could stock lake herring in their former haunts, you could refill that pelagic planktivore niche with a native fish that is more adaptive to Lake Huron’s whims, giving all those predators out there a more stable food source. As a bonus, lake herring are really fun to catch and equally good to eat.

So they carved out a little hatchery space, fought the gales of November to score a few thousand lake herring eggs, and started rearing them. After a few tries, they figured out the system, and in the last couple years a small but robust number of lake herring have been put back into Lake Huron.

In other words, it worked. One biologist said the next baby step would be to stock a half-million lake herring into Saginaw Bay and another quarter-million in Thunder Bay near Alpena, then sit back and see how they do. But now it looks like that’s on hold, and for the foreseeable future rearing efforts will stay at today’s level, about 30,000 a year, while more information is gathered.

Kurt Newman, Michigan’s Lake Huron Basin Coordinator, said the state’s management team supports lake herring restoration, but the hatcheries are at capacity, there’s little money and no one is sure whether expanding the three-year-old lake herring pilot program will even work.

Newman said that since salmon stocking was cut in 2006, that first reduced year-class is just making its way upstream to spawn for the first time. So despite evidence that chinook salmon are little more than fish food at this point, they’ll give the status quo another couple years and conduct a study that should be ready by 2013.

And the lake herring program that seemed to make sense for so many reasons will wait.

Knowledge is good, there’s no doubt about that. The problem with the wait-and-see approach here is the way Lake Huron became something else virtually overnight. It’s still changing. And by the time 2013 rolls around, there’s no way to know what the lake will have become or whether information gathered today will mean anything by then.

Do you need more proof that wildlife managers are completely justified in freaking out about chronic wasting disease?

Well, here’s some: A researcher at the University of California, San Francisco just published the results of a study on CWD that showed two very alarming things. According to a New York Times story, one is that the disease is spread through feces. The other is that deer start spreading it up to a year before they have the disease themselves.

So here is what we know:

1. Deer poop. Two pounds a day. All of them.

2. There is absolutely no way to tell which of those billions of little pellets are harmless and which ones are capable of spreading the horrible brain-melting prions that spread CWD.

3. Those prions are indestructible. They live in soil and nothing kills them. Not fire. Not radiation. And apparently not time.

So forgive me for believing that you can’t be too careful with this stuff. There was a hue and cry last year when Michigan banned baiting after a captive deer turned up positive for CWD. The argument was that the infected deer was captive, so why were wild deer being subjected to such onerous rule changes?

Some people simply could not accept the answer: We don’t know enough about CWD. Well, if this doesn’t answer those doubts, maybe some people have deer pellets where brains should be.

It spreads invisibly. It cannot be stopped. And that’s why you really don’t want it in the first place.

Got it?

Greatnorthernoutdoors.net is updated with new articles every Thursday.
Previous content on hunting, fishing and other outdoor subjects can be found
under the “Outdoor Adventure” button above. Here’s what’s new for the week
of September 3, 2009:

– Securing the future: For more than a decade, Minnesota’s hunters and anglers agitated for a state fund dedicated to clean water and wildlife habitat. Earlier this decade, environmental groups began to see the wisdom of taking care of the state’s natural resources, and last fall a surprising coalition’s conservation vision became reality. When Minnesota voters passed the Legacy Amendment, they guaranteed that billions of dollars would be used over the next 25 years to preserve their outdoor heritage.

– Take a look: Tony Hansen is a deer guy, and he’ll tell you he’d rather have a good binocular with him in the tree stand than pretty much anything else — even clothing, but let’s not go there.

– On the fly: Long-time Michigan fly shop owner Steve Southard tells why fly fishing is so special to him — and why the sport is no longer just for the big-money crowd.

– New video: Late summer is the time to scout your deer ground, but be careful. It
doesn’t take much for that big buck to figure out he’s being hunted, and
when that happens it could be game over before the season even begins. Face
it: He’s going nocturnal at some point, and if he figures out what you’re up
to, you might never see him again. Tony Hansen explains how to be smart
about scouting that deer to improve your chances of seeing him during the
hunting season.

I’ve never really understood the gap that sometimes exists between the hooks-and-bullets rednecks and the greenie tree-huggers.

I’m positive there are people who would consider me one or the other. I tend to think of myself as both. I love to hunt and fish, and I make no apologies about killing animals so I can eat them. We as a species are hard-wired to do that. Meat nourishes us. It’s why our ancestors invented weapons. It’s why they had opposable thumbs with which to grasp them.

But it’s important for us to take care of our planet. Acid rain is bad. Mercury emissions that land in lakes and contaminate fish are bad. Human decisions that compromise habitat are bad. Take your trash out of the woods. Reduce your carbon footprint. Recycle.

So let’s hear it for Minnesotans, who realized en masse that those two worldviews do not exclude each other. Thanks to a coalition of old-school outdoors folks and new-school environmentalists, Minnesotans last year voted to tax themselves — it’s a 0.375-percent sales tax — so they could protect wildlife habitat and keep their state clean.

They’ll keep huge forests undeveloped, restore critical wetlands and clean up lakes and rivers. Some people will enter the food web to hunt and fish there. Others will just observe.

And they can all take credit for doing the right thing.

Bravo.