Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
wise—take a rapid toll. In the end, 40 percent to more than 80 percent of the transported deer are dead
within a year.
Added to all this is the expense, which is high. It costs roughly four hundred dollars to trap and
transport each deer, or forty thousand dollars to remove one hundred deer from an area. Moreover, this
expenditure has to be repeated every year or two because of the whitetail's high reproductive rate.
Some communities have chosen to hire professional sharpshooters, who typically work at night from
raised platforms adjacent to baited areas. Two of these are the 1,200-acre University of Wisconsin Ar-
boretum and 1,200-acre Long Island in New Hampshire's Lake Winnepesaukee. Expenses for this op-
tion vary somewhat according to a variety of circumstances, but seventy-five to one hundred dollars
per animal seems to be typical.
Finally, other places have taken the option of using public hunting as a means of control. Often the
hunters are carefully selected and must pass a marksmanship test. For safety reasons, only relatively
short-range weapons are used—shotguns, muzzleloading rifles, and bows. One of the prime attractions
of this option is the fact that it's essentially accomplished with little or no public expense (hunters' li-
cense fees usually more than cover any operational expenses incurred by the state wildlife agency).
Examples of this approach encompass a variety of situations. The two-thousand-acre Mary Flagler
Cary Arboretum in New York State has used controlled public hunting for nearly thirty years to keep
deer in check. The land surrounding the big Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts—the water supply for
Boston—has more recently utilized limited public hunting to reduce the number of deer, which were
destroying any forest regeneration. On a larger scale, Connecticut has had considerable success with a
special season in what it calls the Urban Corridor zone.
In the end, it all boils down to one thing: the deer are going to die anyway, so it's only a question
of what method to use. Even those who advocate doing absolutely nothing and leaving the deer strictly
alone in these sheltered enclaves of overpopulation are only choosing a different form of death. Left
to their own devices, these increasingly overpopulated deer suffer from malnutrition and its associ-
ates—disease, parasites, and, if nothing else claims them first, ultimate starvation.
Returning to the whitetail's mating habits, a doe is usually bred by the area's dominant buck, though
sometimes by a lesser buck who has the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time and, in a
deer's version of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest's reputed philosophy, “got there firstest
with the mostest.”
A gestation period of about two hundred days ensues. Because most does are bred during their first
estrus, this means that the majority of fawns in northern latitudes are born in May or early June, but
there are always some that aren't bred until their second or even third estrus, so that some fawns arrive
as late as July and August. These late-born fawns are so small by the time cold weather and snow arrive
that their chances of surviving the rigors of winter are very slim.
Whitetail fawns are among the loveliest and most endearing of all creatures. Weighing only six or
seven pounds at birth, the tiny creatures come equipped with a reddish-brown coat and lines of white
