After finishing my hunt at an old gamelands haunt on the first day of buck season I engaged in conversation with an old time hunter in the parking lot. This fellow had been hunting that gamelands since the 1940's and believed the deer were declining. I told him the woods in that gamelands were in a state of destruction because the deer were too numerous. He looked at me in total disbelief. I then received a dissertation on how there used to be 30-40 deer dragged into the parking lot by noon on the first day - and how those days were gone. "We're shooting too many doe," he said. I responded that we hadn't been shooting nearly enough doe and that we ought to increase the anterless license allocation in order to shoot more. His facial expression indicated I was a total nimcompoop and unworthy of further discussion.
Like many hunters, he saw only the superficial evidence in a local area. He used to see more deer and now he wasn't, so we had to be killing too many doe. He pointed out the clearcuts the game commission had timbered and said there was plenty of browse, but no deer to eat it. I hear that argument a lot but you have to look more closely at those clearcuts.
On my way to my hunting stand I passed two clearcuts that were timbered in 1992. The regrowth is now 15-20 feet tall. The former woods were mostly oak and maple, so you would expect the replacement trees to be the same, particularly when the composition of the surrounding forest is also oak and maple. Instead I noted most of the regenerating trees in the first clearcut were black birch and tulip poplar, neither being preferred food for the whitetail. The second clearcut further up the slope had more diversity, but again, with an overabundance of species deer don't like to eat - sassafras, black cherry, black birch, black locust, Hercules club, fire cherry, tulip poplar and some aspen. Red maple, the whitetail's favorite winter food, was also present, but thinly scattered. I didn't see any oak or oak seedlings except around one tree the loggers had left standing. When mature, these two stands will not be producing any acorns the deer depend on in the fall to build up fat for the winter, nor will there be much understory growth of species they like to eat. Why was the regenerating forest different from the original? The reason was too many deer. The deer had virtually browsed out most of the oak and maple right after the clearcut allowing only the unpalatable species to grow and dominate. A normal sized herd couldn't have accomplished that. Plant species that deer prefer to eat have little chance for survival with so many browsers. Also, in the surrounding mature forest there are practically no seedling trees, so there is little browse available there too. The deer are beginning to eat ferns and some black cherry, not out of preference, but out of necessity. I know from summer excursions there that the wildflowers are nearly non-existent and the most numerous flowering shrubs are those the deer don't like to eat. Here again the deer have already browsed out their preferred shrubs leaving less nutritious species to dominate. In short, the range and composition of the forest is being altered by the deer into very poor deer habitat.
The important point is this: When less browse is available, it doesn't take as many deer to over-browse the range. Where it once may have required 500 deer to over-browse the range, once the composition has changed, it may only take 100 deer to over-browse the same range. Consequently, even though there may be fewer deer than the old days, the range is still over populated, and the solution is to reduce the herd even further until the range recovers. This will take some time. This understandably makes little sense to the hunter who is seeing fewer deer and being told that the solution is to further decrease the herd size.
Reducing the herd size is not a simple matter. We have an anti-hunting public out there, many of whom are landowners who know nothing about forest health and post their property against hunting. Some of them have good reason for doing this, I know, but I'm not talking about those who do it for safety or those whose property has been abused.
Getting anterless licenses to the deer hunters who will use them is another problem. Those hunters who don't think there are enough deer buy anterless licenses just to keep other hunters from getting them. Anterless licenses are limited and given on a first come first serve basis. Not every hunter who applies is successful at getting one. This makes it difficult to determine how many licenses to issue. At one time I remember the Game Commission had to sell seven anterless licenses in order to get one doe harvested. Their anterless license allocation has to take into account that some will not be used and that 20% of the anterless harvest will be button bucks.
Another problem is city suburbs where deer cannot be hunted. Deer reproduce unchecked there and spread into the surrounding area. Areas which might be successful at reducing the herd size often find themselves getting repopulated from deer spreading out from the suburbs.
There are many other problems. Deer management is a complicated matter that will never please everyone. There are some new proposals and an upcoming conference that will be discussed in a future column.
