WE will always have a lot of areas with very poor habitat because 50-60% of our forest habitat will be in the pole timber stage and I think we all age that pole timber will always be poor habitat no matter how many deer we have.
Yes we can agree that pole timber is generally poor deer habitat but I don’t know where you get the idea that much of the state, or even any county or management unit, is in pole timber.
Based on the most recent forest index survey I can find only 29.2% of the state was in pole timber.
I am going to post the amount of seedling/sapling, pole and mature forest percentages for Elk County, your home county and also for the state.
Area…………………….Seedling/sapling……………..pole stage……………..mature forest
Elk Co……………………..8.5 %……………………….18.2 %…………………..73.3 %
Luzerne co………………..10.2 %………………………46.6 %…………………..42.3 %
Statewide…………………14.1 %………………………29.2 %…………………..56.7 %
You really shouldn’t try to evaluate and talk about the whole state based on just your little bit of knowledge about your own back yard.
But you have always claimed the poor habitat in 2G was controlling the herd, rather than the increased doe harvests. Now you claim 2G has tons of excellent deer habitat on the ridges and plateaus that is available to the deer around 9 to 10 months/yr. So just how is that excellent habitat controlling the herd?
Absolutely the habitat combined with the other environmental conditions (such as winter snow conditions) are what have the most control over the deer populations. When you have good mast crop and mild winter years the deer population increases due to the higher fawn recruitment rates. When you have poor mast and/or harsh winter years the deer population declines due to the low fawn recruitment rate the following year.
The improved food supplies certainly help the deer gain weight through the spring, summer and fall but it simply doesn’t matter how much food they had for nine months. If they can’t get to that food the other three months they are going to lose enough weight their fawns aren’t going to survive the next spring. In fact following those harsh winter with two or three months of deep snow we find a pretty fair amount of winter mortality of the juvenile and even adult deer.
Excellent habitat the same as poor habitat do influence and even control deer populations both up and down and anyone that doesn’t recognize that fact is doing more then demonstrating how little they know about the wildlife/habitat inter-relationships.
BTW, the habitat in the valley wintering grounds isn't going to recover unless the areas are cut and since many of thhose wintering grounds are located on the flood plains they are not likely to be cut anytime soon.
You are correct that they aren’t going to be cut in the foreseeable future but I am not so sure they need to be or even should be. What the wintering grounds need is more of the pine/hemlock component they should have. Since it takes about 200 years to grow a pine/hemlock forest we aren’t going to see it in our life time but that doesn’t mean it isn’t partly our responsibility to set the stage to have it back at some time in the future. Some things about the old winter grounds habitats will likely never return because we will probably never have the American chestnut component back in the wintering grounds like it should be.
But, we can most certainly have wintering grounds that are in better conditions for supporting deer then many of them are when we try to carry too many deer. Some of the wintering grounds in this area are just now starting to recover from the extreme browsing that occurred back in 2002 and 2003. I am going to include a picture some wintering grounds habitat about three years after our last harsh winter. It is just now recovered to the point it could support deer through a hard winter again.
I will also include a picture of how the deer affected the rhododendron during our last round of harsh winters. The rhododendron has replaced the pine/hemlock that should be growing in our wintering grounds because we carried too many deer for so long the pine and hemlock were browsed out of the existence when they were trying to establish. Now that deer numbers are down a bit in some of those areas the pine and hemlock are starting to grow in the wintering grounds again but it will still be a hundred to two hundred years before they are mature enough to provide the winter the thermal cover the deer need for higher numbers.
R.S. Bodenhorn