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Blame
progress for declining Sierra deer herd
By Ron Wilson
August 28, 2003….
Since 1953, the deer herd has been on a steady decline in the High
Sierra.
Yes, there have been a
few good years. But those have been with the help of Mother Nature as
she turned loose her liquid sunshine and ivory snow in time to push the
deer out of the thick cover so they could become easy prey. But the deer
population has just not been the same.
Resident deer tag sales
have also been impacted in California. You can find information back to
1970 on the DFG
website. In 1970 390,000 1 deer tags were sold, in 2002 that number
dropped to 147,000.
Our Sierra deer herd is
hurting for several reasons.
One of the big ones is
the Sierra range is no longer able to support the number of deer it used
to. Man is covering the habitat with more and more buildings daily,
crowding the deer toward smaller areas. Many of these are transplants
from metropolitan areas that don’t believe in owning guns let alone
hunting.
With the number of
private parcels that dot our forestland increasing the ability to access
the public areas becomes more difficult.
Instead of letting
forest fires run their course so that there is prime grazing for the
deer herds, man is putting them out. Deer thrive on vegetation that
grows the first few years after a fire. Without those fires, the habitat
becomes unable to support wildlife populations.
A lot of quality deer
habitat has been laid to waste by the timber industry as they plant more
and more trees to harvest, which in turn blocks the sun, preventing
growth of the shrubbery and grasses the deer need to thrive on.
The new mountain lion
law letting them overpopulate their own environment is another of man's
blunders. In the early fifties the ratio of deer to mountain lions was
approximately 750 to 1. That number has declined to less then 30 to 1
today!
To make matters worse,
poachers -- the good ol’ boys that use spotlights to take a buck here
and there, are hitting the herd that is left hard.
Private hunting clubs
with loose morals also contribute, the ones that think shooting a few
doe for camp meat is still OK!
While most other states
offer great deer hunting, ours is steadily going downhill as the deck is
stacked against the hunters.
Maybe the Department of
Fish and Game should start importing whitetail deer -- they seem to be
more acclimated to people than blacktail.
Unless the DFG does
something to improve the deer hunting, the license sales will continue
to fall off as more and more deer hunters quit hunting deer.
The DFG will probably
solve that problem by selling a third deer tag to supplement the drop in
tag license revenue!
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