RE: Remember PA Guys......
Apparently many people fail to understand how deer populations are influenced by the local habitat combined with the environmental conditions.
We had more deer a few years ago because we were under harvesting them, due to the previous public and political pressures, but we also have several lucky years combined with those reduced harvests. The lucky part was that we had almost a decade of very mild winters combined with reasonable to great mast production. That provided ideal conditions for abnormally high deer populations.
The problem with those high deer populations is that they can’t be sustained once you get more normal or harsh winters with no mast crop even if hunters hadn’t harvested any of them. In fact if the hunters would have harvested fewer of the deer it might well have resulted in an even more severe crash of the deer populations.
What really cased the deer populations to decline over most of the state was the increased deer harvests, which was the agencies efforts toward getting the herd under control before harsh environmental conditions caused a crash, combined with those harsh environmental conditions that arrived before we had succeeded in getting the deer population in balance with more normal hard winter food supplies.
If you take a look you will see how the areas hardest hit with low deer numbers today had experienced about ten years of reduced antlerless harvests during the same time we had mild winters with good mast crops. Then you will see that the deer herds crashed following three years of failed mast production combined with two back to back winters of prolonged periods of deep snow conditions that forced the deer to spend almost two months in the habitat depleted wintering grounds.
The result was several years of reduced fawn recruitment because mom didn’t get enough food, through the winter, to produce fawns that weighed the minimum amount to survive after being born. One year of the reduced fawn recruitment is bad enough and hunters will start to notice a reduction. But, when you get back to back years of the reduced fawn survival and recruitment you start to get a compounding factor kicking in and it takes more then one year for hunter to start seeing the deer numbers increasing again.
On the plus side is that during those years of reduced deer numbers we started to get some habitat recovery because there weren’t the maximum number of deer the habitat could sustain. Now we are once again starting to see the deer numbers on the increase due to another good mast crop followed by a mild winter.
The problem is going to be if we don’t continue to keep the deer numbers at a low enough level that we continue to get habitat recovery. If the habitat starts to go down hill again then we can guarantee that the deer populations will crash again the next time we experience multiple back to back years of harsh environmental conditions. The environmental factors are always going to have some influence on the annual fawn recruitment, and thus the post season deer numbers, but when you have habitat that allows for the environmental factors to have total control of the deer recruitment factors then you are no longer managing the resources but simply allowing nature to control the factors. There are some people that think that is what would be best but they are wrong when it comes to species that have few natural predators yet the capacity to both increase their population rapidly and adversely affect their food supply. If we don’t control species with that capacity their numbers do stabilize but it is always at a low number that is subject to boom and bust cycles based on the changes in the environmental influences.
The bottom line is that hunters and high hunter harvests was not what caused the present decline in deer numbers in this state. It was the previous lack of habitat protection and restoration that caused the low deer numbers of the past few years. The habitat is now starting to improve and so are the deer numbers. But, we have to remember that the habitat has to come first, it can not be the other way around because no species can exist for more then short term without having enough nutritious food to both sustain them and allow for surviving offspring.
For the guy that is seeing better habitat and still seeing spikes I will simply answer by saying that can be a positive sign too. Perhaps that means the improved habitat combined with the better buck/doe ratio, from antler restrictions, resulted in more juvenile does making breeding weight the previous fall, getting bred and producing a fawn. A higher percentage of those fawns from juvenile does will be born a few weeks later then older does which then results in their buck fawns being spikes as yearlings. That is not a negative but a positive since those bucks wouldn’t even have existed in the past.
There is a lot more to deer management, and in the normal fluctuations in the deer numbers, then just how many deer were shot by hunters. Until hunters wake up to that fact they will continue to push the wrong buttons that will continue to harm the future of good and sound wildlife management principles. It has been the lack of hunter understanding and knowledge that has been the biggest stumbling block toward having long term sustainable and higher deer numbers over much of this state. We could have more deer, than we presently have, if the hunters and politicians would allow the professionals to do their jobs with the best knowledge available. But, the hunters and politicians don’t allow the professionals to do what is best for the resources so we will continue to do the best we can with our hands tied.
Dick Bodenhorn
WCO, Elk County