Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
waiting for a crusty snow that wouldn't hold a deer's weight but would sustain the weight of a man on
snowshoes. A hunter merely had to locate a deer and go after it; the deer, quickly exhausted by breaking
through the crust and floundering in deep snow, was easy prey for the hunter on snowshoes.
By the mid-1800s, the seemingly limitless supply of white-tailed deer in the United States had
dwindled to an estimated 1 million animals, a pathetic remnant of a once-great population. Fortunately
this was the whitetail's nadir, because alarmed sportsmen conservationists began to press for measures
to protect and restore this magnificent animal.
These measures took several forms. First, laws were passed in some states banning all deer hunting.
Second, whitetails were live-trapped in areas where they were still present in moderate numbers, and
then used to restock areas where deer were either extremely scarce or had been eliminated. Vermont
again serves as an example. Deer hunting was outlawed in 1865 and remained so for thirty years. Sub-
sequently, a number of deer were imported from New York to restock portions of the state where deer
had been nearly eliminated.
As helpful as these steps were, habitat regeneration was even more important. It's axiomatic in wild-
life management circles that there can be no wildlife abundance without decent habitat, and resurgent
whitetail populations proved it. Agriculture was rapidly evolving and becoming more mechanized; this
meant that the roughest little hardscrabble hill farms were abandoned as farming became concentrated
on the better lands. Also, sheep raising and other forms of agriculture moved westward after the Civil
War, triggering more farm abandonment. Abandoned agricultural lands reverted to brush in a few short
years, thereby creating prime habitat that the now-protected deer speedily filled.
One major reason for the whitetail's rapid salvation from the brink of the abyss is its reproductive
rate, which is very high for a large mammal. When deer are well nourished, many does only six months
old will breed and bear a fawn the following spring. Older does generally have twins, triplets are by no
means rare, and quadruplets and quintuplets have been reported on a few occasions. This reproductive
potential, if unchecked by predation, can produce an astonishing number of deer in a very few years.
In one experiment, an area of roughly one thousand acres was surrounded by deer-proof fence. Bi-
ologists then used controlled hunting to cut the number of deer in this enclosure to ten. Then they
stopped all hunting to see what would happen. What happened was that the ten remaining deer multi-
plied to 212 in only five years!
By the turn of the century, whitetail populations had rebounded to hunt-able levels in many areas of
former scarcity, and strictly regulated hunting seasons were established. At this point another piece of
the jigsaw puzzle of whitetail biology came into play: the mating habits of the species. This, as we shall
see, had major consequences that were to prove both a blessing and a curse to wildlife managers and
the deer themselves.
To understand this part of the puzzle, it's necessary to digress and explore the nature of the male
deer—the whitetail buck. First, two widely held notions about the whitetail buck need to be corrected.
One is that they have horns. Wrong! Cattle, sheep, and goats have horns, but not members of the deer
family. Horns are hollow, permanently attached, and grow throughout the owner's life. Deer, on the
