MICHIGAN NEWS: Who Are the Predators of Deer?

Wolf, bear, coyote or bobcat.

If you had to name the carnivore that kills the most white-tailed deer in the Upper Midwest, which would you pick?

If you are thinking smaller rather than larger, you're on the right track.

The answer is coyote, at least according to preliminary data from a study in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

The sample sizes were rather small, and I am somewhat skeptical of how robust or generalizable these findings are. As for the data:

In all, 57 adult deer and 44 fawns have been captured and fitted with tracking devices.

The data are from Jan. 1, 2009 through Aug. 31, 2010. Though preliminary, they are showing some very interesting results.

Coyotes in the study area were responsible for 13 fawn mortalities, followed by bobcat (9), unknown predator (5), abandonment (4), unknown agent (3), black bear (2), vehicle collision (2), wolf (2) and bald eagle (1).

Among adult and yearling female deer, coyote killed 6, followed by wolf (3), black bear (2), drowning (2), birthing complications (1), vehicle collision (1) and unknown predator (1).

Source: MJOnline

NEVADA NEWS: Mule Deer Declining, Predators Targeted, Biologists Ignored

Declining western deer herds have biologists, sportsman groups and environmentalists clashing over whether mountain lions and coyotes are largely to blame and should pay with their lives.

On one side are those who believe the number of deer predators should be reduced through targeted hunting programs. Others say factors such as the loss of natural habitat and wildfires are the issue.

It's an emotional debate, says Jim Heffelfinger, regional game specialist with the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

"The scenario plays out in just about every state, Heffelfinger says. "When these things flare up, they're white hot."

That's the case now in Nevada, where the issue of killing lions and coyotes that prey on deer has state Department of Wildlife officials at odds with a governor-appointed commission that oversees them.

Nevada's mule deer numbered about 106,000 in 2009, down from a high of 240,000 in 1988, according to state estimates. Mule deer, characterized by their large, mule-like ears, are common throughout the western United States.

"We've got a war going on," says Cecil Fredi, president of Hunter's Alert, one of two hunters groups that petitioned the Nevada Wildlife Commission to approve three predator-control projects last December. It did so against the advice of department Director Ken Mayer and his biologists, who said killing mountain lions and coyotes was not scientifically justified.

Officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services, which has the final say, refused to proceed. Doing so without full support of state wildlife officials would put them in an "untenable position," says Jeff Green, director of the western region for Wildlife Services.

State biologists say the deer's troubles are not due to predators but to continuing loss of habitat from development, wildfire and invading non-native grasses.

Tony Wasley, Nevada's mule deer specialist, says when lack of habitat is the problem, "all the predator control in the world won't result in any benefit."

Gerald Lent, chairman of the Nevada Wildlife Commission, says predators are an important part of Nevada's mule deer problems and addressing them is "long overdue."

The issue is also heating up in Arizona and Oregon. Arizona's mule deer number about 120,000, half the size of the herd in 1986, according to the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

Oregon's mule deer numbered 216,154 in 2009, down from 256,000 in 1990, according to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Duane Dungannon, state coordinator of the Oregon Hunters Association, says that even though mountain lion hunting is allowed year-round, "it's not even putting a dent in the state's cougar population."

"It's no longer that uncommon to bump into a cougar when you're deer or elk hunting, but it's becoming more uncommon to run into a deer or elk," he says.

Brooks Fahy, executive director of the non-profit Predator Defense, based in Eugene, Ore., worries the state's cougar population is "crashing" because of year-round hunting.

Source: USA Today

RESEARCH NEWS: Using Predators To Reverse Deer Impacts

Researchers writing in the February issue of BioScience propose reintroducing small, managed populations of wolves into national parks and other areas in order to restore damaged ecosystems.

The populations would not be self-sustaining, and may consist of a single pack. But the BioScience authors suggest that even managed populations could bring ecological, educational, recreational, scientific, and economic benefits.

The authors, Daniel S. Licht, of the National Park Service, and four coauthors, note that research in recent years has shown the importance of wolves to ecosystems in which they naturally occur. For example, the presence of wolves usually leads to fewer ungulates, which in turn generally means more plant biomass and biodiversity. Wolves can also increase tourism.

Licht and his coauthors believe that wolves introduced for the purpose of ecosystem stewardship, rather than for the creation of self-sustaining wolf populations, could enhance public understanding and appreciation of the animals. Advances in real-time animal tracking made possible through global positioning system technology, as well as the use of contraception and surgery, could help in controlling the growth of introduced populations. This approach might mitigate concerns about depredation of livestock and game, attacks on pets, and human safety, Licht and colleagues maintain. Fences could also play a role.

Wolves were introduced to Coronation Island, Alaska, for ecosystem restoration in 1960, and they successfully controlled deer there before the wolf population grew and subsequently crashed. Licht and his coauthors suggest that with more intensive management this unfavorable outcome could have been avoided, and that desirable results could be expected at many sites in North America and elsewhere, provided there are sufficient prey.

Source: Science Daily

MONTANA NEWS: Statewide, Mule Deer Numbers Decline

It’s tough to be a mule deer in Montana these days.

The big-bodied deer draw lots of hunting pressure all over the state, although not always the same hunters. For the past three years, mule deer numbers have been declining and state Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials are trying to turn the trend.

In western Montana, poor mule deer numbers are tracking equally poor white-tailed deer populations. But the two species are regulated differently, with more liberal either-sex hunting opportunities for whitetails. That puts the focus on the other predators: wolves, mountain lions and bears, according to Region 2 wildlife program manager Mike Thompson.

While wolf predation has been getting most of the attention lately, Thompson said lions shouldn’t be discounted. The agency increased its lion hunting quota last year to see what impact extra cat hunting might have. That data should be coming later this spring, when hunting regulations might see further lion focus.

Montana’s wolf quota filled quickly in the two western hunting districts last fall. Wildlife managers are studying the results of the hunt over the winter as they await a federal court ruling on the wolf’s threatened species status. That decision will either allow or prohibit a 2010 wolf hunting season.

Habitat is another concern, according to Thompson’s counterpart, Jim Williams, in Kalispell’s FWP Region 1. Mule deer are less common in the northwest, but no less treasured.

“The country is so rugged – all these alder-choked basins – but you can kill some beautiful old bucks,” Williams said. “It’s a brutal physical hunt. A lot of big bucks die of old age.”

They don’t die by wolves so much because their high alpine haunts don’t overlap with the packs’ preferred whitetail zones. But those areas have seen decreasing snowpack and increasing forest invasion over the past decade, which reduce the forage mule deer desire. The downward deer trend still needs more research to figure out the trend drivers, he said.

Lions and two-legged hunters are the main challenge in the eastern plains, according to hunters there.

“We’ve got zero wolf impact,” said Red Bone Outfitters owner Bud Martin of Zortman, near the popular Missouri Breaks hunting grounds. “All the predation impact here is mountain lions. Around the Little Rockies (mountain range), a mountain lion hunt is just a 10-minute jog.”

Martin said he’s seen a particular lion increase (and mule deer decline) on the C.M. Russell Wildlife Refuge, where federal regulations prohibit mountain lion hunting. But he also laid some responsibility on FWP hunting policies, which he said ran down western deer herds and encouraged excessive numbers of hunters to head east.

“That’s why people come to eastern Montana to hunt,” he said. “They get tired of hunting where success rate is 2 or 3 or 4 percent. And so every fork-horn mule deer out here gets blasted.”

FWP state wildlife program manager Quentin Kujula noted mule deer have always been helped and hindered by their local situations – whether its predators, weather or the species’ own up-and-down population cycle. Lions in the eastern part of the state are a relatively recent factor, he said, but one to watch.

FWP biologists also acknowledge that liberal license sales in past years have hurt deer populations. That was the rationale behind proposals eliminating over-the-counter doe tags in most of western Montana and dropping the eight-day either-sex period of the 2010 hunting season.

Those changes, and other reductions to mule deer license availability, will go before the FWP commissioners at their Feb. 11 meeting.

Source: The Missoulian

UK NEWS: Proposal to Reintroduce Lynx to Control Deer

Lynx should be reintroduced into Britain to control rising deer populations, a senior Oxford University ecologist has said.

The big cats, which were hunted to extinction in this country 500 years ago, would be the most effective way of enforcing the annual cull of 500,000 deer that experts say is necessary to protect the countryside, according to Professor David Macdonald.

The head of the university's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit said that the predators would pose no risk to humans, and has urged for dozens of the animals to be imported from eastern Europe.

East Anglia and the Highlands and Southern Uplands of Scotland would be among the prime candidates for lynx restoration, which has previously been tried in countries including France, Italy and Austria.

"As far as I am aware there has not been any recorded case of a lynx being a danger to people and they are the most practical candidates for reintroduction into the UK," Prof Macdonald said.

"There are all these deer that people are having to control and the lynx could help out. A few sheep would be killed but experience on the Continent shows that it is manageable."

There are thought to be more than two million deer in Britain, the highest level for a thousand years. Farmers blame them for eating crops, destroying woodland and threatening native bird and animal life.

The population rise is partly blamed on the lack of natural predators but Peter Watson, director of the Deer Initiative which is charged with managing the deer population, said that a lynx reintroduction would not solve the problem. Currently 350,000 deer are culled in Britain a year, mostly by shotgun.

"Despite current deer management programme the population is still increasing, so if you want to see the numbers stabilise or decline you need to do something else. But I'm not convinced that natural predators can provide the scale of culling that is necessary," he said.

"There is clearly an issue with domestic livestock and pets as well. In Switzerland, nearly 200 sheep were killed by lynx in one year."

Any lynx reintroduction scheme should first be trialed in Scotland where deer populations are highest compared to human habitation, he added.

A spokesman for Natural England was cautious about the plan.

"Lynx are also territorial and you would need some pretty large home ranges for them – if you are going to introduce up to 100 animals which is what would be needed, then only a vast tract of land would be suitable."

Source: Telegraph

GERMANY NEWS: Wolf Resurgence Magically Turns Some Hunters into Crybabies

BAERWALDE, Germany - There's blood on the frost and blame in the air.

The wolves are back, hunting in the night, skulking through gardens, making the farm dogs restless. Sleek and mystical, they have roamed through folklore and fairy tale, a bit of enticing danger at the forest's edge.

But Joachim Bachmann, a hunter with a wall full of trophies, is not so lyrical when it comes to the wolf's reappearance amid the birch and pine of the eastern woods in Saxony.

In today's Germany, the wolf is a "protected species." Mention these two words and you had better duck, because Bachmann can't quite get his mind around how a sheep-eating machine should not be shot on sight. It bothers him even when he sits at the big table in his big house looking out the window to a damp land speckled with paw prints.

"What positive thing does a wolf bring to nature? Nothing," he says.

Something else out beyond the winter grass perturbs him too. Down the road, past a church and through a forest so dense it seems like walking through the bristles on a hairbrush, a woman Bachmann describes as a misguided Little Red Riding Hood charts the personalities and nocturnal habits of wolf packs.

Gesa Kluth's boots are muddy, and her maps are worn; to Bachmann, the biologist is an infuriatingly dedicated state-funded wolf lover.

She's not cooing about him either. Kluth points to a picture on her door of a sturdy white-haired man in a hunting hat peeking out from a stand of evergreens. It's Bachmann.

"He's our No. 1 enemy. We were thinking about getting darts to throw at it," she says.

Kluth spends her days and nights tracking wolves, where they sleep, play and hunt on a territory of about 115 square miles. She plans to trap a few, fix them with radio transmitters and follow their migrations, which appear to be drifting north and west. To her, the wolf is a stealthy, swift, misunderstood beauty.

"The problem is that hunters see themselves as the predators who control the animal population from overpopulating," she says. "But now the wolves have returned and they are the natural predators, which threatens the hunter's lifestyle."

Wolves were hunted to near extinction in Germany in the Middle Ages. They reappeared from time to time, between wars and other epochs that changed borders and rearranged forests.

Dozens were shot in East Germany during the Cold War. But the demise of the communist government and the rise, after German reunification, of environmentally conscious successors have given nature a foothold on land that had been lost to warehouses and iron mills that today languish like industrial ghosts.

Wolves reappeared in this part of Saxony in the mid-1990s, when a lone male crossed the Neisse River from Poland, which has about 500 wolves.

The first German pups were born in 2000; today at least 25 wolves wander the forests on army training sites and hunt along the brown coal of strip mines. A few others live to the north in Brandenburg, where their territory widened as 1.5 million people fled East Germany after the Berlin Wall fell. Last year, a wolf believed to have wandered up from Italy was hit by a car in southern Bavaria.

Like the beast he despises, Bachmann arrived in the east after what people here call "former times." He was born in a part of Silesia that reverted to Poland after World War II. He and his family were forced into East Germany. They escaped in 1953 and moved to the Ruhr region of West Germany, where he eventually ran a fleet of coal trucks. A few years before the wolves rediscovered Saxony, Bachmann built a wood house here, decorating it with an antler chandelier and mounted heads of wild boar, bison and rams.

He and his buddies track deer. So do the wolves. Bachmann is worried that the deer population will be thinned and the state will reduce quotas for hunters. Hunting is cheaper in eastern Germany than in the west, but if wolves upset the ecosystem, hunters would have less deer meat to sell and might stop paying to use privately owned game lands. This could suppress real estate values in a region with limited prosperity.

"The wolf population is doubling each year," Bachmann says. "Soon we'll have more than 120, and then the wild deer will be gone and the forests will be empty. I think many of these wolf lovers orchestrated the return of the wolf. They're getting paid to protect the wolf. They use the wolf as a magnet for donations. Look on the Internet -- you can become a 'wolf patron.'"

source:
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/nation/16551444.html