For a lot of us who’ve been chasing whitetails across southeast Ohio for decades, the news coming out of Columbus this week hit like a gut punch. The Ohio Wildlife Council just voted to slash bag limits in four hard-hit counties starting December 1st, the first day of gun week. If you hunt Athens, Meigs, or Washington counties, you’re now looking at a one-deer limit for the rest of the season. Morgan County gets to keep two, but that’s still a big drop from the three-buck norm most guys have counted on for years.
The reason isn’t politics or some anti-hunting agenda. It’s a brutal outbreak of Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease—EHD for short—that’s been hammering deer herds in that corner of the state. If you’ve walked your lease lately and seen dead deer along creeks or in the bottoms, odds are that’s what took them.
EHD isn’t new to Ohio, but this year it showed up early and hit hard. The virus spreads through the bite of tiny gnats called midges—same culprits that carry bluetongue in cattle. Deer get fever, swell up, get weak, and a lot of them head to water trying to cool off before they die. That’s why you find so many carcasses near ponds and streams in late summer and early fall. The Cornell Wildlife Health Lab says it can also jump to mule deer, pronghorn, even domestic sheep, goats, and cattle, though whitetails take the worst of it.
The die-offs were bad enough that wildlife biologists started getting calls from landowners and hunters who were used to seeing thirty or forty deer a day and suddenly couldn’t find five. When the carcass counts started piling up, the Division of Wildlife knew they had to do something to protect what was left of the breeding herd through winter.
So here’s how it shakes out on the ground:
- Through Sunday, November 30th, the normal three-deer statewide limit still applies everywhere, including those four counties. If you’ve got tags burning a hole in your pocket and a decent buck on camera, this last week of November is your window.
- Starting Monday, December 1st—the traditional kick-off of gun season—things change fast in the affected area. Athens, Meigs, and Washington drop to one deer total. Doesn’t matter if it’s a buck or doe, antlered or antlerless; when you kill one, you’re done for the year in those counties.
- Morgan County stays at two deer, which is still better than a lot of guys feared.
- Everywhere else in Ohio? Nothing changes. Three-deer limit, bonus weekend in December, all the usual rules still stand.
The reduced limits run clear through February 1st, 2026, when the season finally closes.
A lot of old-timers are grumbling, and it’s hard to blame them. Gun week in southeast Ohio has always been as much tradition as grocery run. Families pile into cabins, kids miss a couple days of school, and half the county turns orange. Taking one deer instead of three feels like somebody moved Christmas.
But most of the same guys will also tell you they’ve seen the dead deer with their own eyes. One longtime outfitter in Athens County told me he lost close to 70 percent of the bucks he’d been watching on camera since spring. When you’re staring at empty fields that used to hold thirty or forty deer at dusk, one tag suddenly doesn’t seem so bad if it means your grandson still has something to hunt in five years.
The silver lining—and there is one—is that EHD usually burns itself out with the first hard frost. The midges die off, new infections stop, and surviving deer develop immunity. Populations bounce back fast when conditions are right. Ohio’s deer herd has been through this before; some of us remember the bad outbreaks in ’02, ’07, and again in ’12. Each time the woods looked dead for a year or two, then came roaring back.
In the meantime, the message from the Wildlife Division is pretty clear: hunt smart, take a good deer if you’re lucky enough to see one, and leave the rest for seed. Report any dead deer you find—especially if they’re near water—so biologists can keep tabs on how widespread it still is. And maybe spend a little extra time at the lease this winter cutting shooting lanes and planting food plots. The deer that make it through are going to need all the help they can get.
Seasons change. Herds go up, herds go down. That’s the way it’s always been in hill country. For now, one tag in those four counties is the new reality. Make it count.
