SAM Tackles Deer Yard Protection

 By Gerry Lavigne

     In a recent edition of the SAM Newsletter, I outlined a number of recommendations aimed at improving deer management and hunting in Maine.  These were the result of extensive discussions by SAM’s Deer Task Force, comprised of legislators, scientists, outdoor writers, SAM board members, landowner representatives, and hunters at large. 

Our recommendations seek to improve hunting access and doe harvest, to increase youth participation in deer hunting, and to reduce deer losses to predation.  If implemented, all of these strategies would improve DIF&W’s deer management capability, while increasing deer harvests and hunter satisfaction.

            However, one major topic was not tackled by the task force, although it was frequently discussed.  None of the above strategies for improving deer management in Maine will be effective unless our deer have access to a sufficient amount of quality wintering habitat. 

As detailed later, Maine has been losing deeryard acreage over the past 35 years, and this loss of wintering areas has greatly reduced carrying capacity for white-tails, particularly in the northern half of the state (downeast, western mountains and the northwoods and Aroostook farmlands). 

The deeryard problem is critically important to deer management success in Maine.  The SAM deer task force recognized that finding solutions for this problem will require direct discussions between DIFW and the forest landowners who provide the habitat for deer in Maine.  As a stand-alone topic, achieving deeryard protection will be a high priority for SAM in the coming months.

What Are Deeryards?

            In biologist jargon, the terms deeryard, deer wintering area (DWA), and deer wintering habitat are all roughly interchangeable.  They all refer to places deer go to in winter to escape deep snow and cold temperatures. 

In Maine, deeryards are mature coniferous forests comprised of some combination of spruce, balsam fir, northern white cedar, eastern hemlock, white pine, and associated hardwoods.  These forests ideally would be 30+ feet tall, with deep, tight crowns.  Softwood canopy closure would average 70% or more, but the forest would also contain numerous small openings where shrubs and tree seedlings could grow.

            In the northern half of Maine, at least 85% of deeryards are located along water, such as brooks, streams, rivers, ponds and lakes.  With deeryards, size matters.  They range from 50 acres to more than 10,000 acres.  The larger the better.

            Deer select these particular forests because they offer better shelter from deep snow and windchill than do other forest types.  Under the dense canopy of a coniferous forest, snow is usually less than 1/2 as deep as snow in hardwood forests or clearcuts.  Snow under the softwoods is also denser, allowing more support for the narrow, sharp hooves of deer. 

The shallower, denser snow enables deer to travel more extensively in search of food.  Shallower snow also enables deer to more effectively escape chasing-type predators such as coyotes.  Studies have shown that deer losses to predators are lower in high quality deer wintering areas.

Food quality for deer during Maine winters is marginal at best.  Wintering deer begin to lose weight as soon as snow and cold temperatures kill off the lush forages of late summer and autumn.  Winter survival for our deer depends on how well they fattened during autumn, how much winter food they can find, and how well they can conserve energy.  In quality wintering habitat, deer are able to forage better, and conserve critical energy, leading to increased chances of avoiding death by malnutrition. 

Travel in snow is a serious energy drain on deer.  (Try walking in 3ft of snow without snowshoes sometime!)  The shallower, denser snow in quality DWAs lessens this energy drain.  In addition, wind speed is greatly diminished under a dense softwood canopy.

 Deeryards are actually warmer than hardwood forests, or clearcuts, especially on clear winter nights.  Hence, use of mature coniferous forests enables deer to reduce the amount of body fat they need to burn to stay warm.  This too improves winter survival.

            The availability of quality wintering habitat reduces deer mortality whenever and wherever severe winters occur in Maine.  In the northern half of the state deer could not persist, even in low numbers, without quality deeryards.  This is especially true in the face of uncontrolled predation by coyotes.

The Deer Yard Problem

            During the past 35 years, a large amount of deer wintering habitat has been altered to the point where it no longer favors deer use and survival.  In the late 1950s and 1960s deer occupied 10 to 12% of northern and eastern Maine during winter. 

Although many of the 2,500 known deeryards were severely over browsed, most seemed to offer the forest structure deer tend to seek.  The deer populations in the northern half of the state in the late 1950s were abundant by today’s standards (perhaps 15 to 20/sq. mi), and the big woods of Maine yielded 2/3 of the state’s deer harvests (35,000 to 41,000 deer statewide).

Today, the northern half of Maine supports 2 to 5 deer/sq. mi, and only 15% of the statewide deer harvest occurs there.  Beginning about 1970, both the acreage and the quality of deer wintering habitat has dropped dramatically.  The decline has been incremental, steady, and unrelenting to date.

 By 2000, DIFW records indicated that deer wintering areas comprise only 2 to 5% of the landscape.  Many deeryards have been obliterated by logging and the ravages of the spruce-budworm outbreak of the 1970s and 1980s.  Other DWAs that remain have been reduced in size, or thinned by natural tree mortality, budworm damage, and/or logging to the degree that they are no longer optimal for deer survival.

            When the DIFW’s deer plan was updated in 2000, the public made it abundantly clear that current low deer populations in the northern half of Maine are unacceptable.  Not only are these low populations failing to provide adequate hunting and wildlife watching opportunities, but they are also damaging the economic viability of a part of Maine that is heavily dependent on its natural resources.

            The past 25 years have demonstrated that limited doe harvests alone are not sufficient to allow deer populations to increase in northern and eastern Maine.  Predator control can help, particularly where deer populations are being held below the carrying capacity of existing deeryards. 

Predator control can also be used to shift some deer mortality into hunter harvest, if conducted properly.  But neither harvest restrictions nor predator control can increase long-term carrying capacity for deer that would allow us to regain the deer populations we enjoyed in the 1950s.  This can only be done by regaining some or all of the quality deeryard acreage that we have lost since 1970.

            Accordingly, the DIFW set both a short-term and a long-term objective for deer in the northern half of Maine in 2000.  Over the short term, annually manage deer mortality to bring the population up to the carrying capacity of existing deeryards.  Over the long-term (30 years), increase deeryard acreage to 8% or 9% of the land base.  Achievement of the long-term objective would restore northern and eastern deer populations to at least 10 to 15 deer/sq. mi, perhaps 3 to 5 times the current deer density.

            Problem is: how do you regain the use of more than half a million acres of altered forest for effective use by wintering deer?

Protection Dilemma

            Actually, there are three dilemmas.  First, the forests that deer select in winter are not stable environments.  All forests change over time, in species composition, physical height and canopy density, and in their ability to provide food and shelter for deer.  Agents of change within our forests include logging, insect infestation, wind throw, fire and natural aging. 

It may require 30 or more years for a young forest to grow into a type that provides the attributes deer select during winter.  In forests dominated by short-lived species like balsam fir, the dense conifer crown may thin after 50 or 60 years due to natural mortality, thereby shortening the time these forests will remain at optimum quality as wintering habitats.

 Simply acquiring forest acreage without managing it to maintain its wintering properties for deer will not guarantee perpetual use by deer.  Properly timed timber harvests can improve and maintain the forest as quality wintering habitat. 

            This leads to the second dilemma.  Commercial timber management in the northern half of Maine is often practiced at time and spatial scales which conflict with the types of timber management that improves and maintains deeryard quality.  Typically, timber harvests in deeryards need to be light in timber volume removed, small in relative acreage treated, and frequent in application to perpetuate deeryard quality. 

This becomes a problem for many forest landowners who must operate at large scales of timber harvest volume and acreage to remain economically viable.  Many landowners see these timber harvesting restrictions in DWAs as being an unrecoverable cost of deeryard ownership.

            Which brings up the third dilemma.  Although Maine’s deer population is “owned” and managed in the public trust by the state as a valued natural resource, the wintering habitat deer critically need rests almost entirely in private ownership.  Only 3% of Maine lands are owned by the state or federal governments.  Private individuals and corporate entities of all types, therefore, provide the vast majority of our deer habitat.

            If there is a “cost” of some kind associated with deeryard preservation and management, should private and corporate landowners bear all of that burden?  Should the cost of good stewardship of Maine’s deer resource be borne entirely by the private sector for the greater public good?  Or do private property rights outweigh public stewardship values?  Maine has been trying to strike a balance between these two concepts for 40 years or more.

            In Maine’s unorganized towns (roughly 1/2 the state), a state agency called the Land-Use Regulatory Commission (LURC) broadly controls land-use practices.  LURC is guided by a comprehensive plan that seeks to strike a balance between private property rights and stewardship of socially or environmentally important places.  Among the latter are deer wintering areas.

            Since 1973, LURC and DIFW have worked cooperatively to identify important DWAs, and then to place these habitats in protective zoning where timber harvest can be prescribed to benefit deer.  In the past 30 years, more than 185,000 acres of deeryard have been zoned by LURC.  While this was a good chunk of real estate placed under the protective wing of the state, it is far from all of the nearly one million acres of deer wintering habitat we had in 1970.

            Moreover, the state has learned that placing deeryards in protective zoning under LURC did not guarantee that habitat quality would be maintained and improved over time.  Self-imposed criteria governing deeryard zoning were very stringent, hence DIFW and LURC zoned less DWA acreage than what deer actually were using at the time.  Frequently, timber companies reacted by clearcutting coniferous forests surrounding LURC-zoned DWAs, effectively isolating these protected habitats. 

Sometimes, landowners pre-emptively clear-cut deeryards after being notified of their existence, but before the state got around to zoning them.  In many cases, landowners found timber harvest restrictions too costly to perform inside the smaller LURC-zoned DWAs.  Consequently, DIFW has found it difficult to gain landowner cooperation in managing LURC-zoned deeryards.

 Finally, a number of DWAs have been degraded by timber over-maturity, budworm damage and wind throw, despite being “protected” by LURC.  Degraded wintering habitats may become mortality sinks for wintering deer, leading to local die-offs or abandonment of the site.

While protective land-use zoning certainly has a role to play, this strategy alone cannot be relied upon to regain and perpetuate Maine’s deer wintering habitat base.  If the regulatory approach using the ”stick” of land-use zoning was not entirely successful, would a kinder gentler “carrot” approach prove more effective?

            Cooperative management agreements between landowners and DIFW are a recent application of the carrot approach.  Cooperative agreements seek to apply timber management practices on larger areas within individual watersheds. 

Since deer winter near water, and can move up or down a watershed wherever there is suitable cover, timber management can be used on a more “company friendly” scale to sustain both timber supply and availability of deer wintering habitat.  The “carrot” for the landowner in this arrangement is predictability in timber supply; the benefit to Maine people is a more stable acreage of deer wintering habitat over time.  The other “carrot” for the landowner is the publicity value of appearing to be sensitive to wildlife habitat needs. 

Still, for the system to work, landowners must continue to hold onto some forest acreage beyond economic maturity, and the intent is to manage for time intervals measured in decades, not months or a few years.  Hence, large acreage cooperative agreements have not appealed to all forest landowners.

            Over the past decade, DIFW has negotiated long-term cooperative agreements in lieu of LURC zoning for roughly 250,000 acres of deer wintering areas in northern Maine.  This is a substantial accomplishment, but DIFW is concerned about the long-term effectiveness of these agreements. 

These agreements are not legally binding and do not necessarily continue after a given company sells its land.  With the high turnover in timberlands currently taking place in Maine, the protection accorded to many deeryards in these cooperative agreements is increasingly being placed into jeopardy.  New landowners may well reject cooperative deeryard management in favor of other corporate or private uses of the land.

            One more passive means of deeryard protection occurs when land is placed into a conservation easement, or ecological reserve.  These two strategies primarily differ in their approach to timber harvest and access.  Ecological reserves exclude vehicular use and timber harvest, while conservation easements generally allow access and regulate timber harvest.  Both exclude development.

            During the past decade, more than 2.5 million acres of Maine wildlands have been placed into conservation easements or ecological reserves.  More are being negotiated.  Since conservation easements tend to be applied in riparian areas, many easements currently on the books likely include historically-used deeryards in northern and eastern Maine.

Similarly, ecological reserves tend to be large and likely encompass wintering habitats in the mix. We don’t know how many of our former deeryards are now protected by conservation easements and ecological reserves.  This should be quantified, and where possible, timber harvesting practices should be tailored to improve and maintain deeryards for the long term.

The Right Strategies

            For DIFW to achieve its long-term objectives for deer, they need to maintain 3/4 of a million acres of quality deer habitat in the northern half of the state.  No one protection strategy will accomplish so large a task.  Clearly, multiple strategies must be implemented. 

There are problems and limitations for each strategy, and some clearly infringe upon landowner rights.  DIFW has been calling for a dialog between forest landowners and that agency to begin discussing the deeryard protection problem. 

SAM is committed to making that dialog a reality.  Perhaps a direct meeting of landowners, DIFW and LURC staff, and SAM could identify common ground and lead to an equitable and workable set of strategies that would benefit landowners and restore the deer herd in a part of Maine that has suffered a deer shortage for too long.

This is an opportune time to sort out various deeryard protection strategies.  Within the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of acres of coniferous forest that were logged and/or damaged by budworm will again be growing into winter shelter for deer.  How much of that acreage actually becomes viable, as deer wintering habitat will depend on the conservation strategies we implement today.