There are three major species of deer in North America – whitetails, mule, and black-tail. Anyone living east of the Rockies knows that the recovery of whitetails from half a million a century ago to around 30 million today is one of the great conservationist stories of the 20th century. http://www.actionbioscience.org/biodiversity/rooney.html
Mule deer are found in the West from the Arctic Circle to northern Mexico. It’s estimated that there are as many as three million of them, living primarily in higher elevations.
An estimated 445,000 deer live in California, which is about equal to the city of Sacramento's human population. This may sound like a lot, until you realize the deer are spread over the entire state’s 99 million acres. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article24727537.html and most of California’s deer are found in the Sierras, and they are mule deer.
There is another species of deer in California, black-tails. Black-tail deer are found in forests along the Pacific Coast, with the Sitka subspecies in British Columbia and Alaska, and the Columbian subspecies found in Washington, Oregon and California as far south as Monterey Bay. According to zoologist Dr. Valerius Geist, DNA research finds that mule deer are a hybrid of black-tail bucks, and whitetail does, but clearly mule deer and black-tails are very different. http://www.blacktailcountry.com/html/blkpage.htm
Black-tails are called the “Ghost of the Pacific,” for they live in areas with dense vegetation and do not have white showy tails when they bound away. Instead they sneak away through heavy brush, with black tails hard to see. https://animalsake.com/facts-about-black-tailed-deer This makes them the most challenging deer of all for hunters.
In contrast to whitetails and mule deer, black-tails aren’t flourishing. In fact their populations are declining. We know this only too well in the “Emerald Triangle” of northwestern California – Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity Counties -- which historically has the reputation of being California’s “Deer Factory.”
Anybody worth their salt in modern day deer management circles would concede that the term “Deer factory” is a by-gone term for the northern remote mountains of California, called the B-Zones. Fifty years ago it was normal on a walk through the woods to see 40-50 deer in a day in this area, despite the fact that it’s heavily vegetated thanks to the annual rains and coastal fog. In the good old days of the Emerald Triangle it used to produce a robust harvest of Columbian Black-tailed bucks. In Mendocino County alone, in 1954 an astounding 5,232 bucks were harvested. In 2016, 6,573 bucks total in all the 6 B-Zones combined were harvested. Today, few bucks are seen and the greater numbers of deer we once saw regularly have vanished largely in northwestern California.
Thanks to renown past deer biologists, Dale R. McCullough, Richard D. Taber, Raymond F. Dasmann, William Longhurst, and A. Starker Leopold, these researchers created for us the most comprehensive, yet readable and detailed analysis of black-tailed deer management ever written, but that guide has slipped away, being replaced by a substandard political model, which has helped destroy this resource in less than 40 years.
We must ask ourselves this question? Are these creatures worth saving? I believe the answer is yes. It certainly is for The Mendocino County Black-tail Association.
So, to dive right in we ask, “Where are all the black-tail deer in the Deer Factory?” In days gone by, deer were more relevant to the general culture of Californians. They hunted, and they loved deer. In 1980 there were 608,000 hunters in California when the population was 21.5 million people, and the deer population was about two million. Today, there were 272,229 licensed hunters in California in 2017, with a human population that’s now 39 million, and a state-wide population of about 445,000 deer. https://www.wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/Mammals/Deer/Population
The California deer population has plummeted over the past two decades by 46% - if the yearly count of bucks killed by hunters is a proper measure.
https://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/Popular/mtnlions.html
The statewide hunter success ratio for deer hunters in California in 2010 was 15%, according to Fish and Game data. That means about four out of five hunters who purchased a license and deer tag from the state and attempted to harvest venison for their family failed to bring any home. In Colorado, by comparison, the hunter success rate for deer in 2011 was 43%.
http://www.record-bee.com/article/NQ/20160809/SPORTS/160809840
What about the culture of the modern wildlife managers in 2018? What do they have to say about this? The last plan was 1978-83. We don’t have a deer plan yet for the deer, but there is some movement.
In 2008 I was contacted by Craig Stowers, wildlife program managers of the CA Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. Craig asked me where I would consider to be a good area to conduct a deer study to find out what limiting factors could be suspect for the continued decline of black-tail deer in Mendocino County. I said to Craig, whom I consider one of the last premier Mohicans of Deer authorities, “Why don’t we study the Mendocino National Forest?”
It was suggested that UC Davis’s Hopland Research Station should be the study area. I said, “The forest would be a better study, that way we can provide the public with a real time analysis of what is going on in public lands, not a private site.” Thus, the Mendocino
Deer study was born.
When all the smoke cleared from the study by 2013, we determined many interesting things in the environment of the Mendocino National Forest. In a nutshell, without citing the numerous yet thorough 62 pages of the entire scientific analysis of the Mendocino National Forest, we have a handful of biological reasons why the deer have all but disappeared in comparison to the 1970’s. I quote several key statements from the study.
“Our results show that deer in the Mendocino National Forest are currently declining in abundance. We found evidence that the decline is caused by high mortalities due to predation in all age classes…. Predation was the primary cause of fawn mortality, and black bear predation was the largest single source of mortality… Mountain lion predation was the primary cause of mortality of adult females equal to or greater than 1 year old.” http://www.deerfriendly.com/deer/california/long-term-trends-in-california-s-deer-population
And, “deer with larger amounts of forage within their identified home ranges were less likely to die of any cause, including predation.” https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Heiko_Wittmer/publication/273449867_Black-tailed_Deer_Population_Assessment_In_The_Mendocino_National_Forest_California_2009_-_2013/links/5501f7440cf24cee39fb2795/Black-tailed-Deer-Population-Assessment-In-The-Mendocino-National-Forest-California-2009-2013.pdf
I should also add that coyotes prey on black-tail fawns, and the local coyote population is robust. So far, we only have a handful of wolves in the area, but that may increase also, although their numbers may be limited by the declining number of black-tails.
That’s some of the biology. But, the human side is at least as important, and it really boils down to this. In the Emerald Triangle, where we live, we all know why the deer are gone. They can’t eat fir trees, they don’t eat noxious weeds, predators are given carte blanche access to them, logging is gone, fire suppression is very popular now in drought conditions. So, habitat is part of the problem. The harvest success rate for the California hunter is 15.6%. The Mendocino Study proved everything we savvy conservation NGO’s have been saying all along and we spent close to a million dollars to prove to ourselves that we were right.
A decadent old growth habitat will kill off all the early successional wildlife given enough time. Unfettered predation is tantamount to the death sentence for deer.
In the study, we determined that the available food quality for the deer in our public lands is old and non-nutritious as a whole. As forestry has declined, deer are in search daily for palatable nutritious food which is in serious short supply. In their efforts to feed themselves the black-tails move about their home ranges and beyond, so they are discovered more easily moving about by high densities of predators, thus the decline. Managing this problem is our challenge for working with federal and state regulatory agencies. The answer? Like always, it’s the sensible honest approach to the problem. Good science, coupled with common sense management, for the benefit of the public who pay for it.
Oh yes. Let’s not forget that there is one other human factor to consider with regards to the decline of black-tails in California. The Emerald Triangle is also known to be the cannabis-growing capital of North America. In January of this year, in California recreational marijuana became legal, along with medical marijuana. When this was voted in, some people said it would do away with illegal marijuana growers, which we also hold the record for. Actually, this has not been the case.
According to Stacey Montgomery, District Attorney of Lassen County, California, international drug cartels are setting up armed camps in California forests and growing massive crops of marijuana, and “because of the legalization of marijuana in California, now we’re seeing those same individuals working with other criminal groups—the Asian groups, the Russian groups, the motorcycle groups—all kinds of organized crime….They are killing wildlife. They’re diverting streams. The damage that they’re causing, both to the economy and to our public lands, is going to be generational.” Actually by opening up sales and ownership of recreational marijuana illegal timberland conversion to cannabis violations have skyrocketed 200% since the passage of the Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act in 2015.
The reality is that less than 1% of the estimated 69,000 growers statewide have received a permit to farm marijuana since the beginning of the year. And, according to the sheriff of Humboldt county, there are at least 10,000 illegal grows in his county alone. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/03/16/feature/californias-outlaw-marijuana-culture-faces-a-harsh-reckoning-legal-weed/?noredirect=on
Montgomery blames both the legalization of marijuana and the state’s sanctuary policies that shield illegal immigrants, including many convicted criminals, from federal immigration authorities.
Recently California Gov. Jerry Brown proposed to increase funding for combating illegal marijuana growers in the state. Sounds like a good idea, except that none of the money is earmarked for the Emerald Triangle, which is the epicenter of illegal grows. http://www.times-standard.com/article/NJ/20180523/NEWS/180529921
So, the black-tail deer are trying. And the declining number of hunters in pursuit of the deer has made repopulation easier. However, as long as deer habitat is disappearing, and the woods are being taken over by armed criminals (who enjoy dining on venison) and whose crops mature as hunters enter the woods, the future of the California deer factory remains uncertain. Now, more than ever, wildlife management is as much people management as wildlife management.
--Paul Trouette
Trouette is President of the Mendocino County (CA) Black-tail Association (www.mcbadeer.com)