doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Super-predators?

In many species taking out the biggest males actually increases the overall numbers.

One instance is red deer, where biggest stags tend to gather harems with more does that they can get pregnant. Killing these stags allows younger (and more fertile) stags to fertilize these does.

Another example is the brown bear. Bears are cannibalous, and the bigger the bear is, the more cubs and young bears it can kill. Kamchatka and many other parts of the world saw dramatic increase in bear numbers after start of trophy hunting.

I understand completely, Goerge. Here is one you can watch. Filmed through the same thermal scope but with no shooting. This was in the same field prior to acquiring the permit. Please keep in mind that this is all in one 52 acre field of young irrigated corn. Gives a little better idea of what we are up against here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swm_nytneSI

SRH

Please understand Stan, if that were my field of corn I'd be doing the same thing you are. Thank goodness, deer don't eat pine trees. They do enjoy the food plots we plant for the deer hunting club every year. With all the tracks, I wonder what a thermal image video if one of my middle GA food plots would look like in November...Geo

If you guys have a deer overpopulation problem in Georgia, all you need to do is hire Dr. Gary Alt to manage the deer herd for your Game Commission.

He left my state about 7 or 8 years ago amid numerous death threats from hunters who became rather upset about deer becoming practically extinct in many counties. I'm not sure where he went.

Geo, Stan, I read a couple of years ago about fear of dramatic deer population reductions by hunters in certain areas of Georgia, but obviously not in Burke County. The "predator pit" concept is thought to be at work in some southern areas. It is hypothesized that coyotes have impacted fawn survival. Once management by elimination of does drops a population to a certain level, coyotes eliminate most of the fawns and the population doesn't rebound. Here's the article:
https://www.gon.com/article.php?id=3045

The coyotes are faring well around here, and have for many years. I used to let people hunt coyotes on my land. Now, I make it explicitly clear that if anybody shoots a coyote here they don't come back. Economics makes strange bedfellows, eh? This overpopulation not only affects farmers in Burke Co., but drivers destroy their automobiles in deer collisions at an alarming rate. There's one or two collisions with deer, on the road I live on, every week it seems, year around. Funny how peoples' opinions of cute little Bambi changes when the front end of their new SUV is destroyed by them. I have known several people who died as a result of deer collisions.

Keith, I could pay a good portion of his salary myself, with the losses I endure, if he would work his wonder here.

SRH

Part of the problem Dr. Alt was blamed for (while heading deer management for the Pennsylvania Game Commission) was that hunters in the Northern Tier and Big Woods counties (bounded, roughly, by the New York line, I-81, I-80 and I-79) were used to going to their camps and sitting on the same stump year after year. While they were doing so, the woods grew up around them and, after 40 years or so, there was very little edge cover/vegetation for the deer to eat. A lot of that land was state forest or state park land and not being logged off at all. I could take you to some of my old stomping grounds in Pike County where the browse line is so sharp you could cut yourself on it, and the only vegetation on the forest floor are inedible ferns and mushrooms on decomposing logs.

In any event, the hunters in those counties, who'd been accustomed to huge numbers of deer (and got fat and lazy about it), were seeing none because there was no habitat to support them.

On the other hand, there now are deer - many, many deer - in leafy suburbs south of I-80 and east of I-81 and in the south-central parts of the state - the agricultural parts. When I was a kid growing up there, there were no deer in those parts. "You want to hunt deer, you go to Potter County", was the watchword. I saw my first deer not in the big woods up north in 1980. Now, they're everywhere. So much so that, for a while, the City of Philadelphia allowed hunting in Fairmount Park to cut down on the deer damage. Maybe they still do - I dunno.

The problem is, of course, that a lot of those deer that are there, are in unhuntable areas (too close to houses) or places where the stump-sitting crew don't bother to get to know the landowner or scout.

You want the Alt solution to your deer problems? Let the forests grow to climax and see how they disappear.

It will be interesting to see, though, how things pan out now that a lot of those state lands up north have been opened by the frackers with new roads and new cuttings. That, and the Game Commission has been doing cutting to create "early successional habitat" on their Game Lands.

I wasn't aware Alt had been threatened over deer management. The only threats to wildlife biologists I've heard about have been by HSUS-adherents to our bear biologists last year in the runup to the referendum we had here (on bait, hounds and traps for bears). That, and some years ago to the NJ bear biologist (whose vehicle was rigged with a dud bomb) in connection (temporal, at least) with their bear hunt. Threatening biologists is a dimwit move, no matter who's doing it.

The mass extinction of ice-age Megafauna that occurred around 12,000 years ago was caused by the thousand year long cooling event called the Younger Dryas.

It was possibly caused by an impact event on the retreating Laurntide ice shield. The effects were very abrupt, in line with impact related event effects. This extinction event is often used by anti-hunting groups to fit their agenda, blaming it on Humanity.

The most notable species to survive the event was the American Bison, in a somewhat smaller form, that was able to recover and expand across the whole of American grassland ecosystems.

Don't fall for the "Humanity is the Rapist of the Earth" mythology.

Regards
Ken

Concur with you on this, Ken, though I will add another thought on "causation".
There are some who believe the Younger Dryas came about after the antecedents of today's Great Lakes found an outlet and dumped huge quantities of fresh water down the St. Lawrence and into the Atlantic, via the Ottawa River and a stretch called the "French River". Today, the French River flows westward into Lake Huron between Parry Sound and Sudbury, Ontario. The supposition is that during the dump of glacial melt, it flowed in the opposite direction to somewhere near Ottawa and into the Ottawa River.
I wasn't there, so I can't say definitively.
But I do note that mammoths and other megafauna survived quite well in Eurasia, right alongside humans hunting them, until about the same time they disappeared from America. (Even until the time of the Greeks and early Rome, on Wrangell Island.)

Sure, that's the theory of desalinization causing disruption of the Atlantic Conveyor. It was the same concept that was the basis for the movie "The Day After Tomorrow". It fits the Man-Made Climate Change mythology. Consider that all the water previously went down the Mississippi watershed into the Gulf of Mexico, the overall effects could not have been that great, even leading to the facilitation of warming, as meltwater hitting the Gulf may have decreased the strength of the Gulf Stream. This is why our river valleys in the Midwest are so wide, because of the glacial melt.

There were elephants on Sicily well into the historical period. As far as Ice-age species, the modern wolf is descended from the Dire Wolf, modern lions and tigers are descended from sabre-toothed cats.

People also forget the dramatic cultural change that occurred in North America with the reintroduction of the Horse. The plains indian culture was very new, previously not being so mobile, with the perfered method of Bison hunting being to run small herds over "Jumps", as foot-hunting was extremely dangerous.

http://www.history.alberta.ca/headsmashedin/

The culture was so fluid and mobile that the concept of "Indian Lands" is very subjective.