New York Deer Management

[Doc]

Ok, it has started already. The outdoors editor for our local paper has apparently gotten some preliminary info from somewhere relative to this year's area deer take, so far. Unfortunately, the article is very poorly written and gives no sources. I'm assuming that the DEC has leaked a bit of preliminary info to try to soften the blow a bit.

Anyway the take is down again this year so far. No estimates were given, but this outdoor writer assures us that there are still "lots and lots of deer out there". Whether that is just his opinion or whether that is based on some kind of reliable data, he doesn't say. Like I said, the article is very poorly written. In a few replies on another thread, I was talking about excuses. Well, this guy has concocted a beauty. Just listen to this:

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"What happened on opening morning?Why were there not more deer taken on that day, which is traditionally the heaviest deer harvest day of the entire season? Well, I am not totally sure, but I believe sunrise on opening day occurred right in the middle of the normal "down" period of deer (and almost all other wildlife species too).

Every species of wildlife has certain periods when it is active, and others when it is resting. For deer, the downtime period is often used for "chewing their cuds". As Ungulates they need to re-chew their food to facilitate digestion. They most often do this an hour or so after they have finished eating.

If you remember, there was nearly a full moon the night before opening day. The skies were clear and deer and other wildlife species took advantage of that bright landscape to feed.

Then as the sun was about to rise, they moved into their resting cover. They remained in their beds as hunters were looking for them in the more traditional hunting areas."

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Folks, I hope this wacko fairy tale was not inspired by any of our DEC personel. I REALLY don't want to hear this kind of crap from them when they begin commenting on the season results. Their excuse last year when they blamed the lowered take on the weather was lame enough, but a story like this would be just too much to take.

Here is another excuse that he has offered up:

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"Another condition that may be hurting hunters is ironically enough, The Conservation Reserve Program. CRP pays landowners to leave a portion of their land fallow, a boon for lots of wildlife species. the landowners are required to mow one third of that land but nothing else. On three different occasions this fall, I have watched groups of does move into these weed field and disappear. Once they lay down in that thick stuff, it would almost take a division of marines to move them out.

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So there you have it folks. Another poor soul grasping at straws to explain away the obvious fact that deer are being over-harvested with ridiculous, silly irrelevant theories. I will absolutely flip my lid if I hear either of these two asinine theories advanced by anyone from the DEC. After last year's excuse blaming the weather, they promptly turned around and issued another huge gob of permits for this year and started talking about season changes designed for taking more antlerless deer. When they start ignoring their own statistical indicators of herd size and start concocting sorry excuses as to why they can ignore bad news, one has to wonder just how far they will go with this policy of deer extermination. What on earth is their motive. When deer take numbers start going down, why not take the heroic stance and declare success for a program well developed and executed? Why make up excuses as to why the numbers shouldn't be believed? Perhaps they are not ready yet to unveil their population density targets to the hunting community. Is that news that bad? It kind of makes you wonder, doesn't it?

Doc

[VermontHunter]

Re: New York Deer Management

Where in the heck did they scrape this guy up....they need to loose this character somewhere out in the boonies and forget about him....

[Doc]

Re: New York Deer Management

He is a retired federal wildlife agent. Normally he isn't quite so wacked out, but perhaps old age is catching up with him. Or perhaps some of his DEC friends have been helping him along with his opinions.

He hasn't always been a mouthpiece for the DEC, in fact I remember many years back he was taking them on about some other deer population issue and wasn't all that tactful about it. Perhaps somebody sat him down and had a talk with him.

Doc

[VermontHunter]

Re: New York Deer Management

I wish to best to ya and your fellow hunters..we also in Vermont are having seriously great issues on deer management, I guess all we can do is hope for the best and hope someone wakes up and has some solid changes to remidy our deer population issue's.

[Doc]

Re: New York Deer Management

As long as your game management people are competent, honest and willing to learn from new sources, they will eventually straighten things out. The problem comes when they spend jillions of dollars designing and implementing population control mechanisms and then start coughing up all kinds of whacko excuses about deer take data that negate the conclusions that their own system's data points to. I believe in the antlerless permit system. The only drawback is in the interpretation of deer take numbers, the lack of on-the-ground verification systems and knowing when to back off. It's a system that still needs tweaking and refining. It is also a system that requires confidence in the results and honesty. I also believe that it is a system that requires the addition of independent on-the-ground checks and balances to verify the statistical data and conclusions. Primarily, that would mean that they need to learn how to extract good unbiased data from the army of hunters who walk the very ground that the DEC is charged with managing. They have a virtual untapped free resource available with free legs, eyes, ears and brains that they have never learned how to utilize to their benefit. When, or if they ever figure out how to do this, they will have a system that when combined with the existing statistical methods, will give them all the data they need to properly manage the state's deer herd.

Doc

[BuckNrut]

Re: New York Deer Management

Doc, What you are suggesting is to reinvent the wheel. We already have a reporting system that (if every successful hunter used) should be reliable. The DEC has to estimate takes based on "poor data" because we hunters (as a group) do not report ALL harvests.

I like the idea of the NYS Bowhunters coming out with a position statement. Is there a NYS Muzzleloaders Assn too? What is there position on all of this.

Does anyone here on the formus know of a ML hunter who supports this change?

I just started using a ML during the regular season, but did not / will not purchase the ML privilege under these changes. That's another unknown. For this change to be effective, the ML hunters need to partake. What if there was some type of "boycott" on ML privileges? This is getting interesting...

[Doc]

Re: New York Deer Management

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Doc, What you are suggesting is to reinvent the wheel. We already have a reporting system that (if every successful hunter used) should be reliable.

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If you are talking about the meager data that is required with every deer kill report, that is not what I'm talking about. There is nothing there about what is observed, only what the sex, age, method of taking, and location of the take. This is vital info, but it is only a small part of the information that could be available if they would just use the free information resources that are walking all over the ground that the DEC is trying to manage.

What I am speaking about is a system that would take into consideration the observations of hunters. All hunters would be nice, but particularly those hunters who have opportunities to spend considerable time on the ground that is trying to be managed. Using myself as an example, I have been hunting the same area for 40 years and spend considerable time scouting and evaluating movements, size and conditions of the herd in that area. It seems to me to be very wrong to be just keeping all that knowledge and observations to myself while those in charge of management are forced to use methods that average important, but insufficient statistics across large volumes of land without any way to check if their statistics are returning correct results. I also know that I am not unique. Many others, all across the state, annually go through the same scouting, note-taking, and observation efforts that I do. Our observations span several years on the same grounds. So far, all these information resources are being completely ignored by the DEC. These people could supply the very on-the-ground verification that all statistical management programs need to be effective and credible. I would imagine that most hunters (or, at least, many) would be more than willing to fill out questionnaires that if carefully designed could be just the tool that allows the DEC to successfully micro manage all localities within the huge WMU's. They could also be used to supply verification of their statistical results to ensure that they are not getting too far out on the wrong limb. The design of the questionnaire would be the part that requires the expertise of the game management people to ensure that the data reported is pure and free of individual bias. I'm sure this wouldn't be that big a task.

If such a program already exists, I am unaware of it. If there is something in place such as this, then the DEC has to be a bit more effective in letting us know about it.

The DEC should not be exclusively interested in deer that have already been taken, but should be equally interested in all the deer. I know that deer take numbers supposedly can be massaged through statistics to arrive at herd condition and numbers. If all things remained the same, I would have a lot more confidence in those statistics, but they don't. Numbers of permits change each year which can have different effects on hunter success. Hunter abilities and equipment are constantly improving which can impact take results, now even the seasons will be changing, which will have a great impact on deer take results. Changes such as these can negate the entire baseline numbers that the current year's data is being compared against. How can statistics evaluate data when the baseline information and measuring criteria that they are being compared against is a moving target.

Now I am sure (or at least I hope) that these changing criteria are at least attempted to be accounted for, but I'm afraid that it is starting to be management based on assumptions which are based on assumptions, which are based on assumptions, etc. etc., with none of the results being confirmed with on the ground observations. In short, I don't believe a deer herd can be managed from an office chair. It appears that management techniques have evolved into just throwing out gobs of permits until the catastrophic results get so obvious that a decision to pull back on permits is made. This means that the herd will continue to cycle wildly from overabundance to scarcity. That's not management, that's just chaos. I think we have the resources to complement the current system and do better and we are just continuing to ignore that resource.

We have come a long way in deer management techniques. The antlerless permit system has proven to be a powerful tool in shutting down a run-away deer population. However, this is not the time to rest on our laurels and declare success. We now have to learn how to use this new tool in a proactive way that guarantees the elimination of this constant target overshooting. It's time to reflect on results, research new and improved ways of doing business and put those last little refinements in place so that the job can be done right.

Doc

[NY911Bowhunter]

Re: New York Deer Management

I like the idea of a detailed questionaire - to supplement the reporting system.

Doc - why not hammer it out and submit it to DEC?

[Doc]

Re: New York Deer Management

[ QUOTE ]

I like the idea of a detailed questionaire - to supplement the reporting system.

Doc - why not hammer it out and submit it to DEC?

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Sounds like a plan...It'll give me something to do this winter.

Actually, for those that think this is a wacko idea, I would like to point out that it actually has roots in something that the DEC is currently engaged in. In that wonderful free issue of New York Outdoor News, there was an article about how "New York's ruffed grouse hunters are being asked this hunting season to participate in a new study to monitor the populations of the game bird". They go on to say that "The information recorded by grouse hunters in this survey will provide insight into statewide population distributions and trends for this popular game species as habitats change both locally and on a landscape scale.....The wildlife manager said that the survey would supply "trend" information, whether grouse populations are up or down in an area, region, and statewide."

It seems to me that exactly that same sort of system could be and should be implemented to complement the deer hunting management statistics.

Doc

[Texan_Til_I_Die]

Re: New York Deer Management

Doesn't the DEC conduct it's own deer census each year? That's how we do it in Texas. We use aerial surveys, spotlight surveys, and other metods each year to determine the current population, then the state biologists set the harvest limits accordingly. The quality of our hunting has never been better.

[Doc]

Re: New York Deer Management

To my knowledge, there are no official deer counting activities conducted by the DEC on a statewide basis. Actually, given the terrain, even aerial attempts at counting deer probably wouldn't be all that reliable because of all the dense cover. I know that a few years back, they attempted to do an on-the-ground count in one of the larger local parks that had a population problem. I don't think they ever came up with numbers that they felt very comfortable with. I believe they did eventually try helicopters and still didn't really get repeatable numbers. Understanding the exact population numbers is something that various game managers have been struggling with for years. They have tried all kinds of schemes including counting droppings and somehow extrapolating numbers from that data. Nothing has really proven to be very reliable and all are extremely man-hour intensive and not very practical, cost-wise. That is why they have come to rely on deer-take statistics. Actually the actual count means very little. What is important is the observable impacts that population has on the habitat. For example, browse lines in the woods is a red flag indicating over-population. Deer condition is another indicator. Certain deer diseases can indicate population problems. That is the purpose of the check stations that very few people actually check their deer into. To my knowledge, these deer check stations are the only way that they try to verify their statistical results, but unfortunately they have not tried to involve hunter observations and hunter perceptions. This free army of observers are going completely unused. I do wish that there was a good reliable way of counting deer, but I'm afraid that is a way off. Some day, I hope that refinements of infra-red satellite imagery will automatically handle it for us, but apparently we are not there yet.

Doc

[Doc]

Re: New York Deer Management

If you guys wonder who the people are that influence deer management permits, take a look at the DEC web-site. They have created something called "Task Forces" for each of the WMU's, made up of Stakeholders. These task forces establish the desired deer population for their individual management unit. This has been going on for the past decade.

Who are the "stakeholders"? Well, lifted right from their web-site, they are "Farmers, hunters, foresters, conservationists, motorists, the tourism industry, landowners, small business, etc,". Now take a look at each of these stakeholders and try to guess which ones have a desire to keep a plentiful herd and which ones would like to see few or no deer. These people have to hammer out a consensus, so I assume that no one stakeholder has anymore say than the other. However, it doesn't take too much imagination to see where a majority alliance of like-think people could exert quite a bit of influence on the process. By the way, who do you think represents the "Motorist" stakeholder? That wouldn't be the insurance industry would it? It should also be noted that most of the task forces have not met since the early 1990's.

Now that I think about it, it has been just about 10 years that the DEC has been wailing the devil out of the herd. By the way, if you still might think that deer habitat carrying capacity has anything at all to do with the deer population management process, I should point out that "DEC deer biologists serve only as technical advisors to the task force, and their primary role is as a subject matter expert. They are available to address task force members' questions and concerns about deer biology and management". So in fact they have input only if or when they are asked. It's amazing how they have spread responsibility all over the place so that they can now point to the task force and say "Hey, that's what the task force wanted. It's not our fault."

Am I reading all this stuff wrong or what??? I'm telling you, the more I learn about this stuff the more it stinks to high heaven! Check out the DEC web-site. you'll be amazed at how much good info is there. Some of it is a bit out of date, but even that is interesting.

Doc

[Doc]

Re: New York Deer Management

Why do I get the feeling that game management techniques are starting to really fall apart? They have turned the decision making tasks over to totally untrained people, completely dumping all responsibility for the tasks that they are being paid to do.

The deer population management seems to be just a case of issuing gobs of permits until it is obvious to everyone (trained or not) that they have gone too far. I suppose the next phase will be to cut back on permits until there are too many deer again. Heck! I could do that. Being proactive does not really seem to be their strong suit. It just appears to be management by chaos.

I'll tell you one thing. If things are not as screwed up as I and many others are starting to view it, the DEC had better start on a PR campaign pretty soon and straighten us misguided folks out. From where I sit, right now it appears that there really is no game management at all.....Just a smoke screen of a lot of bogus statistics designed to look like something is being done, and effective only in that they keep the public completely baffled and confused and thinking that somebody is minding the store.

You know what bugs me the most is the realization that the DEC is our last defense against the anti-hunting forces. Credibility in this particular state department is crucial to the survival of hunting. It is important that we be able to use the expertise if the DEC for our own protection. I want to believe that they still have credibility, but they are not really making it very easy.

Doc