ORIGINAL: Sport 2
Its been a while sinse I have reviewed the statistics so in my conversations I was using round numbers. But Here is what I can refer you to:
The Population Management Plan for whitetail deer 2003-2007 for PA (on the PGC website. It noted that 20% of fawns were killed by predators, It did not mention still births, disease, or cars. Which I'm sure would easily add another 20% to that probably more. It seems to me that 50% mortality roughly sticks in my mind from school.
The same plan also says that says that accross the state the average birth rate is 1 doe - 1 fawn per year.
Another study of tagged fawns on the PGC website ended up with mortality rates of fawns ranging between 16% - 58% across the state.
My thought are that it probably is roughly 50%, but I'm sure this changes greatly from year to year.
Thanks much.... Yes, the mortality rates for fawns does indeed vary from year to year. So many factors including weather, wild food crops, increased competition from other critters, displacement/ habitat lossdue to development, etc, etc, etc. Makes the game of deer management challenging enough. Now inject a higher degree of complexity into the game, as to manage to a specific "class of deer", rather than healthy deer as a whole. Infinitely more difficult to succeed considering all the variables, which change year to year, and we never really can be sure what nature will bring, can we?