Our local deer herd here in Virginia was hit hard in the early 2000's. I hunt a tightly controlled military base next to my home (55,000 acres) that has a team of biologists managing the natural resources on the property. Their estimates that year were we lost nearly 40% of the herd. Every water source around had dead deer in or near it. Horrible to witness. Tim Stamps, the lead wildlife biologist here was talking to our hunting community at the base Rod & Gun club the following year and gave a presentation on EHD. He explained how during drought years the deer will concentrate on the few remaining water sources which, coincidently, also contain the small midges, but in massive quantities, that infect the deer with the disease. Sort of like mosquitoes at small pools of standing water. Unfortunately all the deer in the area must drink water and these small pools are the only thing available during drought years so the disease runs rampant throughout the herd. It takes years for the herd to recover from bad out breaks. However, during the ensuing years we saw larger bodied animals killed, presumably from less competition for available food sources. Also, the healthiest, strongest animals also seem to survive the disease some years as can be seen from inspecting their hooves after killing them during the regular deer season. Their hooves apparently rot off because of the disease and grow back during recovery and can clearly be seen duing the after kill deer check in process by the biologists. ~Steve