Management For Deer Or the Ecosystem? - By Kent Boucher
In a Prairie Farm Podcast Interview with Mark Kenyon we discussed the important role that deer hunters play in bringing conservation practices to the acres that they have influence and control over. Mark mentioned that he views deer hunters as a potential army of conservationists who can be cut loose on the landscape to bring about much of the healing work needed in our ecosystems. I really appreciate this sentiment, and I hope we can get there. But we need to evaluate where our deer management priorities are now, what the needs are, and how we can address them in the future with an army of deer hunter conservationists.
Deer Management Yesterday and Today
Simple, concise, easily repeated messages are extremely helpful when communicating a new message to a large number of people. Whitetail land management as we know it today is a fairly new concept that began to gain traction along with the early deer hunting celebrities and personalities that preached the concepts in books, tv shows, and VHS instructional videos. Of course we now understand that native americans had been managing the landscape for game carrying capacity for millennia, but in the past 30-40 years hunters en masse started learning terms like hinge cutting, food plots, screens, sanctuaries, and a handful of other deer property management jargon that all defined practices that every hunter could implement on their deer hunting properties. Out of that era of deer hunting education countless acres across whitetail country have been changed for increased deer carrying capacity and huntability. This new reality has resulted in what is most likely the best whitetail deer hunting this continent has ever seen. Today many hunters have been able to make changes to their properties that allow for maximum genetic potential for antler size to be expressed, maximum fawn recruitment for replenishing each year’s population, and landscape manipulations that bring deer to the exact locations the hunter plans to tag them. But with all of those “improvements” we need to ask ourselves how have the deer done so well when many other members of their ecosystem have been drastically declining?
Where Is The Need?
A few springs ago Nicolas and I were visiting SW Wisconsin where we were impressed by the immense amount of deer habitat, and thus the immense amount of deer. The whole place was an unending matrix of edge habitat composed of oak hardwood forest, brushy creek bottoms, and countless clearings filled with corn, hay, oats and soybeans. In some ways the area resembles a much more original look than the landscape here in Iowa does, but it too has been greatly changed through logging, farming and grazing, and the deer have thrived along with these changes. In fact their populations have soared to such great numbers that they have encountered the primary issue associated with too many individuals in too small of an area: disease. Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is the most dreaded deer disease for deer habitat to be plagued with. It’s always fatal, lasts outside of the deer in the environment indefinitely (studies show over 10 years), and is highly contagious. So far the only effective management method for this scourge is lowering the number of deer on the landscape through aggressive harvest goals to spread deer out and cut the possibility of transmission. Manipulating the landscape in this region of the world to encourage greater deer numbers certainly will lead to more tag filling opportunities, but ultimately will cause the deer population to suffer in the long haul as infection rates would continue to climb. So what should be done in SW Wisconsin? Nothing? Just let the forest and clearings overgrow and return to nature? No, that’s not the answer. Management for both the deer and the ecosystem as a whole is the answer. This shift in goals still means forest management, but it might not include hinge cutting for better fawn recruitment and winter survival of deer that leads to inflated populations. This new objective also will mean more food on the landscape for pollinating species, but less forage crop food plots that congregate deer, increasing opportunities for disease transmission.
Here in Iowa deer populations have fared well while songbirds, insects, native flowers, grasses and sedges have seen their populations drastically reduced, and other large mammals such as bears, bison and elk completely extirpated as their habitat acres have been near completely removed and reoccupied by commodity crops, culdesac neighborhood developments, and urban sprawl. Despite the fact that deer have successfully adapted to these changes they have experienced significant population level effects from continued loss of habitat over the past 30 years and drought caused Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease (EHD) outbreaks. Assessment of these needs should shift management goals from simply increasing deer numbers by manipulating existing habitat to support fawn recruitment, to creating more habitat acres of native prairie and forest plantings that can be utilized by songbirds, insects and, if vast enough, large mammals such as bison and elk. Or instead of planting nonnative grasses like giant miscanthus, or pompous grass to screen trips to and from favorite stand locations, land managers should plant a native tallgrass screening mix that will actually provide habitat value for insects and groundnesting birds. And of course all of these species would benefit from allowing wetlands to return on the land which would help mitigate the droughty weather and spread out the watering holes cutting down on the EHD transmission that comes from deer congregating around watering holes, and also boosting populations of native amphibians, waterfowl, and other aquatic species.
Unleashing The Army of Conservationists
In both of these examples deer stand to win, but not dominate, while the rest of their ecological community is elevated. That’s a holistic view to whitetail land management. Holistic management means resisting the short sighted management objectives that treat hunting properties like a slot machine that continuously pumps out deer with each new pull of a lever, and instead taking the patient approach of seeing what ecosystem as a whole is in need of. As Stephen Covey mentioned in his best selling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, highly effective people “Begin With The End In Mind.” As we make management decisions we need to consider how our acres will support healthy deer, and many of the species we hope will eventually return to Iowa, perhaps centuries after our time. Deer deserve a good home to live in, and so do the other members of their ecological community. Those of us who have the power to make decisions on the acres we have the privilege of hunting can be such a force for ecological good if we join up with the army of fellow deer hunting conservationists.
