ORIGINAL: bluebird2
If you don’t know that a cut can be over browsed, and even to the point of failure, after five year, or even ten years, of successful regeneration you are only showing how little you know about the ability of deer to affect their habitat when they reach a state of over population.
I m amazed that anyone with the IQ above a stump would make that claim. Stump sprouts will exceed the reach of deer within a year or two. A clearcut that regenerates successfully will be successful after 10 or 20 years.
Once again you obviously don’t know anything about this area. Stump sprouts here got chewed off to none existence every year until the stump simply died. They would send off stump sprouts year after year but after years of having no surviving sprouts more then inches tall and no leaves all summer they simply died after about seven to ten years of trying to survive and send up a sprout.
I can show you stumps like that, with chewed off stump spouts all day long even yet with the lower deer numbers we have today.
Pretty nearly any place that wasn’t fenced during that twenty year period, and longer in many areas, ended up with no surviving stump spouts. A few areas did have a few beech sprouts that made it though only because they were so poor in nutritional value the deer wouldn’t eat enough of it to eliminate them.
As I said, you are now only proving just how little you really know about how over populations of deer have affected their food supply and habitat n this part of the state.
Guys like you need to come to one of our tours so you can see all of those affects. We placed hundreds of small demonstration fences (a few square yards in size) just to show those very affects that you claim don’t happen. The deer and those small fences have proven you are wrong and simply don’t know what you are talking about.
R.S. Bodenhorn