Population Perception

My "real job" is designing and marketing plastic Plantra tree tubes - devices to protect seedling trees from deer browse. I have worked with tree tubes, and the people who use them, for 20 years - ever since graduating from forestry school in 1989. My customers are largely private landowners (non-industrial private forest owners or NIPF's in forestry parlance) who grow up on a rural property and either still live there or have moved to the city but still own the place in the country as a weekend property. In the last 20 years I have had hundreds of versions of the same conversation. The customer always says, "You know, I grew up on this farm and we didn't see our first whitetail deer until 19XX, and we didn't have a deer hunt on this property until 19YY."

The exact year of the XX and the YY depend on where the customer lives. West Virginia? Perhaps something like 1963 and 1973. Iowa? More like 1974 and 1979.

We know that there are a ton more deer than when many of us were kids. Organizations like the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association were founded in the 1970's to confront the issue of low deer populations.

But are deer numbers really at a record high? Are we really at an "unhealthy" whitetail population? 20 years of working with people who can't grow trees due to deer browse tells me yes.

However, the 20 years snapshot of my career so far is much too small a sample size to learn anything meaningful. And learning something meaningful about whitetail populations and their impacts over time is the reason I started this blog.

More Deer Than Ever?

This quote from Leonard Lee Rue III's The Deer of North America is probably as good a place as any to start the discussion:

"It is often said that there are more deer in North America today than there ever have been. I have made the statement myself, buy my present research forces me to question its accuracy. I cannot prove the point one way or the other, however, and don't think anyone else can."

Like many foresters I have taken the statement that we now have more deer in the USA than ever before as Gospel truth, and I have bemoaned the effects of this huge population on forest regeneration. I like questioning long-held assumptions, and that seems like a great place to start a blog about whitetail populations and their long term effects on the landscape.