I’ve often been told but haven’t personally seen Bald Eagles at Barren Lake.

This week I heard from someone who has actually identified our national emblem at the lake.

Ken Berry lives near the junctures of Skaggs and Beaver Creeks. He first saw a single bird gliding through the sky and fetched his binoculars. He was able to confirm it was indeed a Bald Eagle and minutes later, saw another circling, probably mates. Ken thinks they may be nesting somewhere in the Coon Creek area.

I hope to see them for myself in the next few days.

When you write something for the newspaper that is available worldwide on the Web, you never know who’s going to read it. You may remember recently we talked about turkey hunting dogs after overhearing a conversation between Bill Logsdon and Don Price.

This week I received an e-mail from Jon Freis of the American Wild Turkey Hunting Dog Association who had seen the column and wanted to share some information with us. Freis has written a book called Wild Turkey Dogs which goes into detail about training and hunting with this unique breed and the many generations of Virginia hunters who raised these special dogs.

Freis thinks the breeder that Bill had read about was probably John Byrnes who is best known for promoting but wasn’t the originator of the breed. We also learned that there is an organization in Kentucky devoted to promoting the dog. More information on turkey hunting dogs is available online at www.turkeydog.org.

Kentucky’s modern gun deer season is now over statewide and we learn this week from Hayley Lynch of the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife that the total harvest passed 108,000 deer. Even with several days of archery and crossbow hunting left this month, the November harvest of more than 88,000 deer has already topped every season but 2004.

“I thought we might kill 115,000 to 116,000 deer this season, but I think we’re going to do better than that,” said David Yancy, a wildlife biologist in the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources’ big game program. “If it’s a pretty typical December muzzleloader season, that’ll help us toward 120,000.”

The high harvest eases the minds of the state’s deer managers, who closely watched last year’s severe outbreak of epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD). Kentucky Fish and Wildlife received reports of more than 4,000 suspected EHD cases last year. The state’s deer herd is estimated at 1 million animals.

“If EHD had an impact, the November harvest should be down,” said Yancy. “But it’s not down – it’s up. That tells me that EHD didn’t have a significant impact to statewide deer numbers.”

Overall harvest trends are a much better indicator of deer populations than single-year results, however. Kentucky’s total deer harvest has stair-stepped up and down only slightly since 2000, varying by fewer than 10,000 deer most years. “When you take a step back and look at that – that’s stable,” said Yancy.

Hunter harvest of male and female deer has also stabilized, with hunters taking a nearly even split of bucks and does each year. About 52 percent of deer taken so far this season have been bucks.