From Knight Ridder Newspapers
With all due respect to Bambi, deer are the cockroaches of the animal kingdom.
For millions of years, they thrived in local forests among jaguars, cheetahs and grizzly bears.
Over the last century, as the economic engine of western civilization banished one species after another, deer not only survived but multiplied: From 1915 to 2004, Pennsylvania's buck harvest jumped a hundredfold.
In March, the New Jersey Audubon Society for the first time called for lethal methods - increased hunting and, in some cases, professional sharpshooters - to reduce a deer herd it said would otherwise "ultimately destroy many native terrestrial ecosystems."
Those closely involved - farmers and foresters, landscapers, scientists, activists, policy makers and, above all, hunters - represent a range of viewpoints. But on one thing they all agree: Whatever happened and whatever will happen to whitetail deer is entirely the result of humans altering nature.
For thousands of years before Europeans arrived in North America, Indians used fire to clear land for agriculture and pursued deer in large numbers for meat, clothing, blankets, fishhooks and hoes.
William Penn remarked Delaware Indian males attained esteem among their tribesmen "by a good return of (deer) skins."
Indians and colonials are believed to have contributed to a centuries-long decline. But the trigger for massive change was waves of immigrants, and the forces - in economics, agriculture, industry and transportation - that were unleashed to meet their needs.
In their historical retrospection published in "White-Tailed Deer: Ecology and Management," wildlife biologists Richard McCabe and Thomas McCabe described distinct stages in the species' interactions with man:
1500 to early 1800s: Changes in habitat and aggressive harvests, largely by Indians trading for guns, alcohol and Old World goods, reduced the whitetail population by half to two-thirds.
1800 to 1865: Indians were virtually wiped out. The new Americans moved west, abandoning land that soon turned into good habitat for deer, whose numbers rebounded slightly.
1850 to 1900: Railroad construction skyrocketed, with 9,000 miles of track growing to 220,000 over a half-century. Coaches carried millions of newcomers to the interior; refrigerator cars came online in 1867, carrying venison and hides back to markets in Boston, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia. Repeating rifles, widely available after the Civil War, enabled commercial hunters to supply markets with all the meat they demanded.
By the turn of the century, the number of whitetails was estimated at 300,000 to 500,000 - perhaps 3 percent of what it had been just 40 years before.
Deer were nearly extinct.
The history of many species might have ended there. But whitetails had two advantages:
First, the conservation movement that rose from the charred landscape of the late 1800s was led largely by sportsmen, and these recreational hunters wanted more deer.
Second, while men were slaughtering deer (and many other game animals) for market, they also were violently changing other conditions in nature - mostly, it turned out, to the deer's benefit.
Bounties had long been placed on nuisance carnivores like mountain lions and wolves. In 1760, a central Pennsylvania drive was said to have begun with 200 hunters in a 100-mile circle and ended in the killing of 41 panthers, 109 wolves, 112 foxes, 114 mountain lions, 18 bears and 12 wolverines.
By the end of the 19th century, the deer's natural predators were gone. So were its competitors, elk and bison. Better yet, habitat was much improved.
Over the previous century or so, vast tracts of virgin forest had been clear-cut. Eastern white pine was felled for ships' masts. Hemlock bark fed the Philadelphia-based tanning industry. Oak was burned into charcoal for iron furnaces. In the early 1900s, railroad logging cut deeply into the big woods.
By 1907, 70 percent of Pennsylvania's forests had been cleared for timber or agriculture or burned to the ground in fires sparked by passing locomotives. While barren land offered nothing for deer, the seedlings and saplings that soon sprouted were a bonanza far surpassing the original dense woods; newly mechanized farms left nutritious waste grain in the fields.
The resulting "mosaic" of young forest and farmland was "probably the best-laid table a deer can imagine," said Scot Williamson, vice president and northeastern field representative for the Wildlife Management Institute in Washington.
It was into this fertile environment that the new game agencies, charged with conserving wildlife for future sportsmen, went about reintroducing deer.
The Pennsylvania Game Commission in 1906 imported 50 whitetails from Michigan in a stocking program that eventually topped 1,200. In 1907, it forbade hunting antlerless deer (mainly does and fawns).
"We believed we needed to take that step to have a quicker rebuilding of our deer population," said Joe Kosack, author of the official history of the commission's first 100 years, published in 1995.
It worked.
Within 10 years, deer had become so common in some areas that farmers complained about crop damage. Within 16 years, the antlered (buck) harvest, then the most reliable indicator of herd size, had multiplied by a factor of 20.
As early as 1916 the commission's second executive secretary, Joseph Kalbfus, sought backing in his annual report for an antlerless season he believed would be critical to slow unchecked population growth.
He got none from hunters, to whom "shooting a doe or a fawn was akin to stealing from the church," Kosack wrote.
"Thank God I won't be in charge of this work 10 years from now, because someone is going to have hell to pay," Kalbfus told an associate in 1917.
The herd continued to grow.
