The effect of harsh winters on Wisconsin deer populations
I sat in my chair watching a red bellied woodpecker working on a maple tree just off the deck. It didn’t make a hole in the tree but worked on the crotches where they joined the trunk.
Those crotches probably held water and the moist bark provided a great place for insects to live and lay their eggs or something. The woodpeckers didn’t care, they just enjoyed a place with an easy protein snack in the winter. Leopold points out without tree disease, no new trees would grow.
Just before bed that night I heard a calamity on the deck. Something bigger than a squirrel or rabbit. I didn’t make it to the door in time see what made the noise but could see the disturbance in the inch of snow that covered the deck. Something flopped, slid, spun, and whatever else around on the deck before vacating. Images of a coyote catching a rabbit on the deck danced through my mind. But I saw no blood.
One of the bird feeders seemed cattywampus. I walked out on the deck to investigate and found a few deer tracks. Deer don’t usually enter the yard, except by the apple trees in the fall. Last winter I watched one browse on the low hanging branches of the apple trees. We planted a couple apple trees last spring and put the barrier fence up a couple days later. The deer started eating the leaves off the young trees in that period. The trees seemed to survive the grazing, but it gets one thinking. Kind of like watching a woodpecker pecking away at a shade tree in the yard that creates a lot of summer enjoyment. You wonder if the wood started to rot and insects started living in the trunk. Then you wonder if the woodpeckers will create holes in the trunk. And you wonder if you will need to take the tree down.
I wondered what the impact of deer are in our little patch of the world when they become overabundant on the landscape. A little more than ten years ago deer populations ran high just about all over our state.
Except in the public forest areas. The populations there did not see the numbers of deer in 2013 that the privately owned forest did. Since CWD detection of deer in 2001 ended baiting and feeding, the public land deer seemed to start to diminish. And we all know the reason for that. The elephant in the room came from hunters filling antlerless tags for the zone they hunted, on public lands instead of private lands.
The Herd Reduction Hunt in the fall of 2013 followed by a winter that our state didn’t see since 1978. Winter kills deer and that winter in 2014 killed a lot of deer. Since that time the northwoods, especially our public forest areas, really have not rebounded the way those that hunt them hope. And private landowners feel the same in the northwoods of Wisconsin.
A few years ago here and points north had a winter that killed more deer than originally thought. The preponderance of late winter storms in April in the last five years didn’t help deer coming out of hard winters. I suspected that more deer were dying in the winters than the winters were given credit for when winters hung on, or ice covered the ground before snow, or the snow got really crusty and hard for deer to break through.
When that happens, deer need to rely on browse or the sunflower seeds spilled while someone fills a bird feeder on their deck. If the browse is gone that the deer can reach, what do they eat? How long does that take to regenerate? Will it regenerate without logging on that parcel of land?
In a lifetime of hunting public lands, I noticed a reduction in the places that I find certain plants on public lands. We are told that may have come from overbrowsing the landscape when the deer population exceeded healthy levels. Or does all this just get blamed on wolves?
I’ve been under the weather the last couple of weeks and have had time to ponder such things. I don’t think we can expect much change from our government. If we want things to start being different than we need to take the buck by the horns. But do we want to or need to?
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CHUCK K OLAR LOCAL OUTDOORSMAN
