RUMFORD — It’s been a tough winter for people who don’t like snow and record cold temperatures. But the effect on deer is more difficult to determine because winter didn’t arrive in force until the Jan. 27 blizzard and won’t end until mid-April.
Deer had a free ride in the first four to five weeks of winter and didn’t have to dip into fat reserves much, if at all, state wildlife biologist Chuck Hulsey said Wednesday at the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s Strong Regional Headquarters.
By the third week in March, wildlife biologists must report to the department’s Advisory Council their any-deer permit proposals for the state’s 29 wildlife management districts, and the council puts them out for public review. Hulsey said the biologists base that decision on an assumption that winter will continue to be what it has been.
“If it doesn’t turn out that way (by mid-April) and the last few weeks get more severe for certain districts, we can still go back and re-calibrate it and send it to the Advisory Council,” he said. “It’s a little bit like looking at a crystal ball and most years, it hasn’t changed.”
Wildlife biologists monitor the districts to establish a winter severity index. The index is one of the major factors that determine how many any-deer permits the state issues for the fall hunt. Any-deer permits manage the legal harvest of adult does.
Other factors to consider are population objectives for the districts, hunter effort in the harvest of bucks, and antler beam diameters in yearling bucks. The larger the diameter an inch above the base, the less competition for food, which means more deer can be added. The smaller the diameter, the more competition, which means the population needs to be reduced.
Hulsey manages Wildlife Managment District 12, which comprises everything east of the state line from Upton in the north to Stow in the south, and across to Andover and Norway, Byron and Weld and down to Livermore, Jay and Wilton. It includes Gilead, Bethel, Greenwood, Woodstock, West Paris, Newry, Hanover, Rumford, Mexico, Peru, Canton, Dixfield, Peru, Roxbury, Carthage and East Dixfield.
The population objective in WMD 12 is 15 deer per square mile, but it fluctuates annually between 10 and 15 deer per square mile, Hulsey said. He gathers data from a deer-wintering-area weather station on Mount Will in Bethel once a week, recording how far deer sink into snow when walking or running atop it, the condition of the snow, and temperatures.
From that data, a winter severity index can be established.
Severity is measured in percentiles from 0 into the 90s as below average or mild (closer to 0), average, and above average or bad.
Hulsey snowshoed to the station Tuesday as temperatures topped 40 degrees. “It’s a lot warmer and that’s good, but it loosened things up and the deer are sinking. But if it gets colder, the snow will firm up again and there will be less sinking.”
The snow depth Tuesday averaged 19 inches, 10 of which lies atop that hard base from the first few weeks of winter. “They’re only sinking 12 inches today,” Hulsey said Tuesday.
Generally, if deer can get out of deer yards by April 1, they are more likely to survive. If they can’t, survival is measured on a day-to-day basis as they deplete their fat reserves.
“The first four or five weeks of the winter were a gift for the deer, because what snow we had was saturated with moisture through warmth and rain,” Hulsey said. “So when it froze, it was like cement. For deer, actually, it was like walking on bare ground; had no effect on them at all.”
The next six to seven weeks were colder and snowier than average.
“So that makes it very hard to sit here on March 11 with another four or five weeks to go and to be able to project it out from right now,” he said.
So whether it will compound atop last year’s bad winter and further reduce the availability of any-deer permits won’t be known for sure until mid-April.
Winter controls the deer population, Hulsey said.
“If you think about it, if you have small feet and they’re pointed and hard — small, hard, pointed feet is not a good adaptation for living in Maine where there is deep snow — so they have their issues with it,” he said.
As a result, here in the northern end of their range, deer group up and seek out forest cover dominated by spruce, fir, cedar and hemlock, generally in low-lying areas.
In these wintering areas under conifers, deer get out of the wind, the snow isn’t deep, and they establish a network of trails they use that not only helps them conserve calories but escape predators, he said.
“It’s all about conserving energy, because during winters deer rely on fat reserves to survive,” Hulsey said. “That’s like gasoline in a gas tank. “To survive, deer enter winter with a full tank of fat reserves. When deep snow and bitter winds start early or last late into spring, some deer will deplete their fat reserves and die, he said. Fawns die off first, followed by adult bucks, and then does.
“To survive, they have to come out with some reserves,” he said. “They can use 90 percent of their reserves and still survive.”
Those fat reserves are attached to muscles in body cavities, organs and bone marrow, which is the last to go.
“We can look at that marrow and say they have a lot of fat or it’s all gone,” he said. “It ought to be white and have a waxy texture and be solid and crumbly. If it’s runny or red, all of their fat has been eaten up.”
Last week while putting up duck nesting boxes at Stump Pond in New Vineyard a stone’s throw from Route 27, Hulsey said he found two leg bones of a deer that a fisher had been dragging around. He didn’t know what killed the deer or when it died, but he estimated it at between late February and early March.
“Winter was probably two-thirds over when this deer died,” Hulsey said.
Using a hammer, he splintered one end of a gnawed femur and pulled out a good solid chunk of white and waxy fat from the bone marrow that crumbled in his gloved hand when he touched it.
“At the time this animal died, it was in good condition,” he said.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
