Posted: Thu, 28 Jul 2011 04:49 PM - 10,648 Readers
By: John Godspeed
You know times are tough when drought and wildfires prompt the U.S. Department of Agriculture to declare the entire state of Texas a natural disaster.
Across most of the Hill Country, rainfall since October is off by as much as 16 inches, the driest for many places since record keeping began in 1895.
One rancher in Terrell County says he’s only had 0.9 of an inch of rain since July 4 — of last year.
While it is too early to confirm the impact on the state’s white-tailed deer population with scientific precision, two things seem certain: fawn survival will fall and antler size will drop compared to last season, when rain at the right time led to a bumper crop of browse and phenomenal racks.
“What I am seeing traveling around Texas is that in much of the state, we have a very low fawn crop, so in three or four years, that’s really going to hurt us with a gap in mature bucks and does,” said James “Dr. Deer” Kroll, director of the Institute for White-tailed Deer Management and Research and the College of Forestry and Agriculture at Stephen F. Austin State University. “And the gap will get bigger if the drought keeps going next year.”
Older bucks are doing well because they do not need as much to get by, and does are in good shape, he said.
“The reason is that they’ve lost their fawns and they’re not nursing,” he said.
There are no reports of deer dying, said Alan Cain, white-tailed deer program leader of the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department.
“But it’s tough for them to make a living,” he added.
When it gets this dry, vegetation deer depend on dwindles, and what little there is gets eaten, although ranches with well-managed habitat should do OK.
“I don’t want it to sound like a dire issue, though, because deer have been around a long time and survived droughts before,” Cain said. “We’ll know more as we conduct surveys across the state in August and September, and by early October we’ll have a fair idea of their condition and fawn survival.”
Kolby Templeton scores an entry from last season — one of the best for antlers in years — in the deer contest at the Texas Trophy Hunters Association’s Hunters Extravaganza at the Alamodome. (John Goodspeed/Special to the Express-News)
Kolby Templeton scores an entry from last season — one of the best for antlers in years — in the deer contest at the Texas Trophy Hunters Association’s Hunters Extravaganza at the Alamodome. (John Goodspeed/Special to the Express-News)
Kroll advises hunters, land owners and managers to resist the temptation to ratchet up supplemental protein and develop water sources instead, with the ideal being one every 100 acres.
An affordable way is to buy a 450-gallon tank and run a hose to a 40-gallon trough with a float valve, he said.
The tank can be filled from another one in a pickup bed, and a full tank lasts about two months.
While supplemental protein pellets help deer in poor habitat, too much of a good thing can kill them.
During the last drought, he was called to a ranch to autopsy dead bucks and discovered they died from eating pellets too high in protein, which raised the acidity in their rumens and killed the yeast, bacteria and protozoans that help them digest food.
Pellets should contain no more than 18 percent protein and be balanced with fiber approaching the same percentage, he said.
The silver lining is that mesquite trees are dropping lots of beans, and prickly pear cactus is producing good quantities of tunas, which may help deer through to fall rains, Cain said.
Plus, Kroll said, extremely dry conditions reduce parasite and bacterial infections.
While the coming deer season may be a good time to cull the herd to what the drought-damaged habitat can sustain, Kroll cautions to not harvest more does than needed or what may appear to be substandard mature bucks.
“There won’t be a lot of non-typicals because a restrictive diet will keep the kickers and drop tines from growing, and a lot of areas will see at least a 20 percent reduction in antler size,” he said.
Kroll, though, knows exactly when the drought will end.
“When it rains,” he said.
