Deer Population Is More Stable Than Portrayed

To the Editor:

Knowing that I lived in the Newtown area during 1990–1992, did wildlife surveys in the area, and was partially disabled by Lyme disease in 1991–1992, a reader of both The Newtown Bee and Animal People asked me to review and comment upon the remarks by Dr Georgina Scholl that you recently quoted.

First, there is no logical reason to believe that the Newtown deer population will continue to rise. Every habitat has a carrying capacity. The northern Fairfield County carrying capacity was probably reached long ago. It is now regulated chiefly by cars and coyotes, and that will continue to be the case, no matter how many deer anyone shoots.

Shooting deer in the limited public lands will merely chase more of the herd into private property.

Scholl ignored the initial cause of high deer population, the most important issue of all, because until this is recognized and dealt with, hunting as presently practiced will only keep creating an overabundance of deer.

The science of the matter is simple: the size of the deer herd is controlled by the percentage of females in the over wintering population. The higher the bucks-to-does ratio, the lower the reproductive rate.

Deer without hunting have a 1-to-1 gender ratio, a three-year average lifespan, and females bear an average of three fawns successfully in their lives (usually conceiving twins but bearing only one fetus to maturity if food is scarce during winter). These ratios cause the deer population to remain stable.

Humans increase the deer population by skewing the gender ratio toward does. This is done by annually issuing more permits to hunt bucks than does, so that the number of does relative to bucks in the over wintering herd steadily increases. In addition, thinning the herd each fall makes more food available to the survivors, so the does are more likely to bear twins.

This approach is called “The more you shoot, the more you get,” and was frequently written about in hunting magazines during the 1960s and 1970s when state wildlife agencies all over the US were eager to rebuild deer herds, which had become depleted throughout most of their range.

Once a herd consists mostly of does, it is possible to kill does in equal or greater number than bucks, and still have rapid population growth. For example, if you have four does to one buck, you potentially have eight deer added to the population each year. If four of them are bucks and four are does, you can shoot the same number of each gender without changing the 4/1 ratio. Or, you can shoot five does and four bucks, and move to a 3/1 ratio, which will still cause the deer population to increase, even if you shoot a number equivalent to the entire over wintering population. For example, you could shoot five deer, but six would be born.

Though hunting does not lastingly decrease deer numbers, the science of the matter continues to elude those who clamor for fewer deer.

Merritt Clifton, Editor

Animal People

PO Box 960, Clifton, WA 98236                            August 31, 2005