Controlled Deer Hunting in a Square-Mile Enclosure

Seven annual controlled hunts (1954-60) were conducted in a square-mile enclosure in northern Michigan to remove surplus white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and to study mechanics of deer hunting. Normal hunting conditions were simulated as closely as possible. Prehunt populations varied from 13 to 39 deer, averaging 26. Six were adult bucks. The first five hunts were in late November and early December under rigorous hunting conditions. The last two hunts were prior to the regular November 15-30 deer season under less rigorous conditions. Hunters saw 0.75 deer per hour or a deer each 1.33 hours in the field. Bucks were most difficult to locate, requiring about 18 hours each. Fawns appeared most vulnerable to hunting and adult bucks least vulnerable. Good weather usually increased hunting success. Organized drives were most effective per unit of effort but failed to produce even a sight record of a buck over the 7-year period. Crippling losses were held to a minimum but, even so, amounted to 10-15 percent of the kill. A kill-effort relationship provided a reasonably satisfactory mathematical representation of the harvest data. From 1952 through 1958, an average of 44 percent of the fall population was removed yearly reducing the herd materially. Limitation to a one-third harvest would have maintained the original herd numbers. The sportsman is apt to measure deer populations in terms of the deer he sees and shoots during the hunting season, but an abundance of evidence has demonstrated that the animals actually encountered by hunters usually represent only a fraction of the population. As an example, deer drive censuses throughout the country on small, isolated tracts very often report fantastic numbers of deer. Almost invariably when an area is censused carefully, the deer population turns out to be higher than popularly supposed. Yet, sportsmen and others generally are reluctant to accept these findings at their face value. Public acceptance of antlerless deer seasons is often thwarted by lack of understanding that more animals usually are in the woods than meet the eye. An opportunity to demonstrate this seeming phenomenon has been provided by controlled hunting from 1954 to 1960 in the mile-square deer enclosure maintained at the Michigan Conservation Department's Cusino Wildlife Experiment Station near Shingleton, in the Upper Peninsula. This paper is presented to show quantitatively what proportion of a white-tailed deer herd a hunter may actually see and bag under 1 A contribution from Michigan Federal Aid Projects W-70-R and W-96-R. All authors were formerly with the Michigan Department of Conservation, Game Division. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.123 on Mon, 18 Jul 2016 05:50:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 60 Journal of Wildlife Management, Vol. 29, No. 1, January 1965 SConcentration of Deer