When did they start the deer herd reduction?
Which time? They started herd reductions in this area back in the 1930s but it got derailed after just a couple of years due to all the yammering to stop killing does.
There have been countless attempts to get the deer herd in balance with the habitat since then but every time herd reduction has got on the right track that yammering started again.
The most recent herd reduction attempt for this area started in 2000.
And if that many was to weak to give birth and you knew that winter took a toll on the deer in them 2 seasons why did the PGC still gave out those large numbers of doe tags?
The deer didn’t have enough food through the winter for all of them to survive or to be healthy enough in the spring to produce healthy fawns that could survive after birth. When that is occurring the deer and their food supply are sending you a very clear and convincing message. That message is that there are too many deer for the habitat and food supply.
So your answer to not having enough food to support the existing deer numbers is to harvest fewer deer and keep more through the winter to exist on less food per deer?
Unreal!!!!!!
That has been the very problem that leads to the deer population collapse in the first place.
And how do you know them deer died at the lastfew weeks of winter. And shouldn't this been documented along with pictures. How is anything to be done properly or changed to correctif events like thiese are not documented. On a large scale you speak of, it should of been documented. Any specialist in a field would document these things. True?
It was documented. It was documented and recorded when I walked the same wintering grounds drainages for the exact same distances that I had been walking during the previous years at the end of the winter snows. I know those deer were dead because I looked at them and broke the femur bone, when I could find it, to determine if that deer died of malnutrition or not.
Here are the results of my finding per year along the same 4.7 mile stretch of three separate wintering grounds drainages. I just pulled my copies of those reports out of my file cabinet.
Year………………dead deer
1997………………..1
1998………………..0
1999………………..1
2000………………..1
2001………………..2
2002………………..1
2003………………..3
2004……………….10
2005……………….4
The simple fact is that we had mild winters through the 1990’s that allowed the deer herd to grow beyond what nature would normally have allowed. People got spoiled expecting those favorable deer recruitment conditions to last forever but that all ended with three consecutive years of no mast crop combined with harsh winters.
Protecting more deer just means the scavengers have more food cleaning up the dead or weakened deer throughout and following a harsh winter.
The only way to have more deer for the long term into the future to balance the deer herd with the habitat until the habitat recovers enough to support more deer. You have to have the habitat (that means food) before you can have more of any species. That is one of nature’s laws, not mans and man can’t change that no matter how much he wants too.
How did they elk do up there? I would think worse because they eat more than the deer?
The elk did just fine because elk have longer, more powerful legs so they just continued to move through the deep snows even after the deer got locked into wintering grounds. The elk are grazers so they would go out in the open areas, dig the snow off the ground with a front leg and eat the grasses that have little winter nutritional benefit for deer. Deer are browsers through the winter and need to have sufficient browse in the low lands wintering grounds during winters with deep snow.
There are a lot of major differences between elk and deer and their feeding preferences, which is how they can live on the same range without adversely affecting the food supply for the other.
R.S. Bodenhorn