About two winters ago while riding alone in the rain in an ATV, I surprised two deer bedded down in a thicket of scrubby trees. Once rousted, the deer sprinted alongside me for four or five seconds before veering off and vanishing into nearby woods. It happened so suddenly and was over so quickly, I was left wondering if it had happened at all.
There is no sight quite so thrilling in the Mississippi outdoors as the white-tailed deer running at full tilt. Whether calmly grazing on our roadsides or hurtling across a pasture, these elegant creatures are mesmerizing. They move with a speed and grace that seems almost ethereal.
Bronson Strickland, a wildlife biologist who teaches and works with the Extension Service at Mississippi State, has made the study of the white-tailed deer his life’s work. “Work” is not the most accurate characterization of Strickland’s relationship with the Odocoileus virginianus. It’s more like an obsession, a passion.
The relationship came into focus when in the 8th grade growing up in Athens, Georgia, he learned a friend of a friend had a father who was a deer biologist.
“I always had an interest, love, passion for the outdoors,” Strickland said. “I loved to hunt and fish. Once I learned it was possible to make a living as a deer biologist, or that such an occupation existed, that did it for me.”
On Tuesday Strickland shared with the Columbus Rotary Club the results of a research project on deer genetics he’s been involved with. In addition to his findings (reported in a story the day following his presentation), he sprinkled his talk and the Q&A that followed with tantalizing bits of information about the white-tailed deer, general questions you’ve wondered about but never thought to ask.
Like the reason you see groups of deer grazing on the right-of-ways. The woods bordering the highways with their thick canopies allow little undergrowth. Once the fall acorns have been consumed, there is little food for the deer so they help themselves to the crimson clover planted on the roadsides by the Mississippi Department of Transportation to prevent erosion.
“Solve that and you could win a deer hunter’s Nobel Prize,” Strickland told a Rotarian who asked about ways to prevent collisions between deer and motorists (more than 3,000 a year in Mississippi).
Deer have reflective cells in their eyes that give them night vision that’s great for foraging, but is paralyzing when confronted with car headlights.
The light is as much as five times as intense as it is for humans, says Strickland.
“They are literally blinded by the light. They don’t know where to go.”
For that reason, most deer-vehicle collisions occur nights and early mornings.
Those deer whistles you put on your car bumpers — forget about ’em. “That’s been researched and researched,” says Strickland.
The region hasn’t always been overrun with deer.
“In 1492 we had a healthy deer population; by the mid-1800s much of the Southeast was covered in cotton,” said Strickland.
There were no game laws; people were living off the land, killing deer for food, for the hides. Same as what happened to the bison.
Beginning in the 1930s, the wildlife agencies of southeastern states started restocking, bringing five to 10 deer at a time from Mexico and Texas. The success of this effort is easy to see.
Deer population in the state is about 1.75 million, more than one deer for every two Mississippians. Hunters kill (or “harvest,” to use the preferred term) about 280,000 deer annually, according to the Mississippi Wildlife and Fisheries website. Hunters are allowed three bucks and five antlerless deer per season.
Even so, they’ve invading suburban neighborhoods; a decade or so ago, a deer ran through the window of a Main Street lunch spot. Walkers along the Riverwalk report frequent sightings.
Do we have too many deer?
“Depends on who you ask,” says Strickland.
The hunter says not enough, but for a soybean farmer losing part of his crop or an insurance company paying for the results of collisions, the number is too high, he says.
Coyotes have had an impact on deer populations in the past 10 or 15 years.
“They are good fawn killers,” he says. “In certain cases over half the fawns can be killed by coyotes.”
The white-tailed deer has a $1 billion a year economic impact on Mississippi, roughly the same amount as soybeans — that’s a billion with a B. The revenue comes from land rentals, the sale of hunting licenses, motor vehicles, guns and ammo, clothing and habitat preparation.
Strickland sees no contradiction between himself as a researcher and hunter of the white-tailed deer.
In some parts of the North American continent the deer population is kept in check without the contribution of human hunters, he says. Not so in Mississippi.
“In the Southeast the No. 1 regulatory mechanism (for deer population) is hunting,” he says. “We all fit in this ecosystem together. I’m a human being and a predator.”
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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