Deer Friendly - Deer Range

Deer Range Size and

Migration of Urban Deer

Controlling deer populations October 1, 2014 Washington Post

... Tufts University’s studies of the porcine zona pellucida immunocontraceptive vaccine showed that the treatments have stabilized or reduced three deer populations in the field... although testing on truly “open” populations of deer has been limited, nearly every study of movements of female deer in suburbs has found that adult females rarely stray far from home...

Movements and Habitat Interactions of White-tailed Deer: Implications for Chronic Wasting Disease Management SB Magle, LH Kardash, AO Rothrock, JC Chamberlin… - The American Midland …, 2015

... The ratio of agriculture to forest showed strong positive correlation to home range size for most age and sex classes, while forest edge density was inversely related to home range size for adult females. Individual home range size proved largely independent of density and harvest intensity...This suggests localized reductions may create areas of low density without changing the behavior patterns of the population...

Proximate influences on female dispersal in white‐tailed deer CL Lutz, DR Diefenbach, CS Rosenberry - The Journal of Wildlife Management, 2016

... Our results suggest intra-specific social interactions and physical landscape features influence dispersal behavior in female deer. Female dispersal behavior, particularly the lack of directionality, the semi-permeable nature of physical barriers, and the frequency of forays outside of the natal range, should be considered in regard to population management and controlling the spread of disease...

Swarthmore Deer Management Plan 2007

... Deer home ranges in urban habitats have been shown to be small, often less than 100 acres, compared to more rural landscapes (Cornicelli 1992, Henderson et al. 2000, Grund 1998, Kilpatrick and Spohr 2000, Kilpatrick and Stober 2002). Gaughan and Destefano 2005, found that suburban deer home ranges were one-tenth that of deer in rural landscapes...

Home is a safe haven for female deer January 29, 2015 California, Phys.org

... Animals familiar with the risks and resources of the home territories they frequent are believed to be better able to survive in the wild than those venturing into the unknown. Much of what is currently known about the advantages of such site familiarity comes from the study of birds... does' home ranges were very small and averaged 0.74 square kilometers ... [see the study led by Tavis Forrester] ...

Deer Management Program Having Limited Effect October 4, 2014 Maryland, Bethesda Now

... in 2013, there were 2,146 deer-vehicle collisions in the county, one of the consequences of deer overpopulation the hunts are intended to negate. The number has been increasingly steadily since hitting a low of 1,841 in 2008 and surpasses the previous higher of 2,127 in 2002. Parks officials say the reason for it is that deer populations generally don’t travel very far outside of their specific areas....

Wilton, Controlled deer hunt begins again in Wilton October 4, 2014 Connecticut, The Hour Online

... “On average, Wilton has about 200 deer harvested, with 50 taken in the controlled hunt,” ... We have to take the deer from town because deer don’t migrate...

7 Deer Hunting Myths Debunked January 9, 2015 South Carolina, OutdoorHub

... According to wildlife biologist Clint McCoy, male deer surveyed in South Carolina’s Brosan Forest only had a home range of 350 acres. The largest ranges in the survey actually belonged to two yearling bucks, who held a territory of 754 and 640 acres. McCoy told QDMA’s Quality Whitetails that age and size had little effect on how big a buck’s range will be ...

Responses of Female White-Tailed Deer Home-Ranges to Increased Resource Availability

SM Crimmins, JW Edwards, TA Campbell, WM Ford… - Northeastern Naturalist, 2015

... Our results support previous research suggesting that White-tailed Deer home-range size is inversely related to population density and is driven, in part, by intraspecific competition for resources. Relationships among population density, resource availability, and home-range patterns among female White-tailed Deer appear to be complex and context specific...

Pierre, No deer harvesting this year November 3, 2015 South Dakota, Capital Journal

... task force members did two deer counts in the fall ... deer used to be a tremendous nuisance in Pierre. However, the 2011 flood displaced them and greatly reduced the number of deer in the area...

Missoula strives for balance in dealing with urban deer November 27, 2014 Montana, KAJ18

... "A lot of our urban deer - believe it or not - stay in town all the time. They're born in town, they live in town. The hunting season may bring a few extra deer in some places on the fringes where they know they can find those safe spots ... there may be a little change, but not a lot," ..

Think you know deer? Here’s the scoop November 23, 2014 Ohio, The Columbus Dispatch

... Deer don’t travel far, sticking to familiar ground. Does hang with their mothers for two seasons, young bucks for a year. Once a buck has established a territory, it will stay until forced to leave by humans, predators or another buck...

Social and Environmental Influences on Female White-Tailed Deer Dispersal Behavior, Illinois, CM Nixon, PC Mankin - Great Plains Research, 2016

... Dispersal behavior is primarily a male-biased behavior in white-tailed deer ... Dispersal probability was high for females born to subordinate mothers (25 of 26) and for fawns paired with a sibling that also dispersed (25 of 31). Females that dispersed came from populations with similar densities as those of females that remained sedentary...

Summer-fall home-range fidelity of female elk in northwestern Colorado: Implications for aspen management AM Brough, RJ DeRose, MM Conner, JN Long - Forest Ecology and Management, 2017

... We found adult female elk in the White River Study area exhibited strong fidelity to individual home ranges... Hunting increased the distance traveled by individual elk, but did not change the center of their home-range ...

Effects of population reduction on home ranges of female white-tailed deer at high densities, Howard J Kilpatrick, Shelley M Spohr, Kelly K Lima Canadian Journal of Zoology, 2001, 79:(6) 949-954, 10.1139/z01-057

ABSTRACT: The relationship between deer density and home range size is important in assessing the effectiveness of deer reduction programs and predicting the effects of deer on habitat. We quantified annual home range and core area size and spatial configuration of adult female white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) exposed to a population reduction program and a control group exposed to no population reduction program over a 4-year period (19941997). Deer were removed from Bluff Point during a 9-day shotgun hunt in 1996 and a 4-day removal program in 1997. Annual home range size during high deer densities (8891 deer/km2) were larger than during periods of moderate (20 deer/km2) and low deer densities (11 deer/km2). We found a positive relationship between deer density and home range size. Annual home range size for the control group of deer did not differ among years. There were no significant shifts in the spatial arrangement of deer home ranges as deer densities were reduced.

Population density influences dispersal in female white-tailed deer CL Lutz, DR Diefenbach, CS Rosenberry - Journal of Mammalogy, 2015

... We found a positive relationship between dispersal rate and deer per forested km2 and between dispersal distance and deer per forested km2. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that female dispersal is density-dependent and caused by the exclusion of subordinate 1-year-olds as adult females seek isolation before and after parturition...

7 Deer Hunting Myths Debunked January 9, 2015 South Carolina, OutdoorHub

Culling abundant deer populations is controversial and ineffective April 21, 2014 Maryland, HSUS News

... These days, eight out of every 10 deer sighted by Wildlife Rescue volunteers around Feinberg’s house have already been sterilized. They will never get pregnant again. And, unlike deer who are killed, sterilized animals will continue to occupy their half-mile ranges, discouraging other deer from moving in. Given those kind of results, The HSUS—which uses innovation and technology to develop humane solutions to wildlife conflicts—has embraced sterilization as an option for reducing deer numbers...

Truro, Watershed bow hunt did little to decrease Truro's deer population January 2, 2019 Nova Scotia, Truro Daily News

... the urban deer population was at least double the rest of Deer Management Zone 107, which includes South Colchester and East Hants. But based on results of a basic survey conducted with the hunters, that over population does not seem to have spread into the watershed area...

Deer of forests travel more than those in suburbia and farmland February 25, 2018 Pennsylvania, The Patriot-News

... The Deer Forest Study found that the home range of deer in the big woods of northern Pennsylvania, the home range of male and female deer outside the breeding season is about a square mile. But in the agricultural areas, a deer's home range is more likely to be half of a square-mile or even a third of a square-mile [January 26 in the journal "Science," with Diefenbach as a co-author] ...

Country deer wander much more than their city cousins January 31, 2018 Montana, Montana Untamed

... Deer that live in the suburbs will travel much less to find food, shelter and water than deer that live out in the country. Scientists have shown this by capturing deer in Pennsylvania and putting tracking collars on them...

Deer stick close to what they know to survive December 18, 2015 Minnesota, Minneapolis Star Tribune

... Deer have strict territories, and most live within an area of 50 to 300 acres, depending on the food supply and amount of cover...

Lakeway, Living with Deer, Relocation of Urban Deer February 5, 2016 Texas, City of Lakeway

... From 1999 to 2015, 3,643 deer were removed through trap and relocation or trap and process permits ... The only indication of migration the committee found was that of young bucks leaving the City...

Pa. deer, like mammals worldwide, move less in human-modified landscapes January 25, 2018 Pennsylvania, Penn State News... when we had highly fragmented landscapes, home ranges of deer were much smaller — and the deer we studied in contiguous forest and undisturbed areas had larger home ranges," said Diefenbach, director of the Pennsylvania Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit ... fragmentation leads to many different types of plants available to deer so they do not have to travel as far in search of food... people tend to live in areas with better-quality soil, because crops grow better ...

Deer and the Vacuum Effect Fable, Local in Ann Arbor, March 8, 2015

The “vacuum effect” is based on an assumption that deer behave as gas molecules do. Supposedly, if a vacancy is created in one area, deer will somehow sense that and there will be a massive flow of deer into the opened-up area. Soon we’ll be back to the same numbers as before.

Many studies have shown that deer don’t behave this way. Instead, deer favor a home range. They mostly migrate into new areas only because they have exhausted the food in their home range. In other words, if they have exceeded the carrying capacity of their current range, they may migrate. But this is not caused by a vacuum created by the removal of other deer.

Deer As Gas Molecules, Utah State University Extension, 2014

The biologists concluded that deer outside the removal area were simply too strongly attached to their own home range to be drawn to the vacancies nearby. Deer do not behave like “gas molecules.” Genetic analyses suggest that each summer range is shared by a group of related individuals, probably the daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters of a single female. Deer from adjacent areas did not move into the area over a 10-year period.

Movements, Census, and Modeling of White-tailed Deer in Fair Oaks Ranch, Texas August, 2014 Kara Campbell and Charles A. DeYoung, Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute, Texas A&M University-Kingsville

... Deer with transmitters were located by triangulation using a directional antenna. Average number of locations per deer was 46 in 2012 and 51 in 2013. In 2012, female home ranges averaged 41 acres versus 80 acres for males. In 2013, female home ranges averaged 46 acres while males averaged 160 acres. It was unclear why male ranges were larger in 2013 but it was possibly simply related to different individuals tracked in the respective years.

About 80 percent of deer with transmitters were never located outside City boundaries. Deer that did cross boundaries were captured near a boundary and had home ranges that overlapped the city edge. These deer did not penetrate very far into adjacent properties. No deer with transmitters left the city and failed to come back. However, only four yearling males (one-and-a-half years old) were tracked. Research has shown that yearling males are most likely to emigrate. We had two reports of young bucks with ear tags sighted outside the City, including one that crossed Interstate 10. It was clear from the telemetry work that few deer residing in the City were permanently leaving....

Localized removal affects white‐tailed deer space use and contacts MI Tosa, EM Schauber, CK Nielsen - The Journal of Wildlife Management, 2016

... We monitored space use and contacts among adult female and juvenile deer in southern Illinois during 2011–2014; midway through each study season, we removed all members except 1 collared deer from centrally located groups and left control groups intact. After group removal, remnant adult females shortened duration of contacts with neighboring groups, whereas remnant juveniles responded with greater shifts in space use and appeared to join neighboring groups ...

Does Tend to Be Territorial

Ranging behaviour of roe deer in an experimental high-density population: Are females territorial? 2012 Comptes Rendus Biologies, Marie-Line Maublanc ...

We studied the ranging behaviour and spatial relationships between seven roe deer during more than 4 years in a partly wooded 14.2-ha enclosure. The animals (three young males, four adult females) were monitored with GPS telemetry collars. As expected, the surface area and overlap of the males’ bimonthly ranges decreased, and the distance between their arithmetic centres increased, as they became adult and, for two of them, territorial. Unexpectedly, females also tended to space out, the surface area and overlap of their bimonthly ranges being minimal in May to June, i.e. during the birth period. The distance between their arithmetic centres reached its maximum at the same time. Overlap between females’ ranges was consistently lower than those between males and females’ ranges, or between 1-year old males’ ranges. Our results raise the questions of female seasonal territoriality and of independence of the spacing systems of the two sexes in roe deer.

New research sheds lights on doe movements related to breeding, hunting pressure September 4, 2016 South Carolina, Index-Journal

... Does typically increased movement rate, probability of activity, and likelihood of being out of their seasonal home range as their dates of conception approached... about half of the females made an excursion and temporarily left their home ranges around their conception dates... read the research [PDF]

Deer on Czech-German border still respect former Iron Curtain 25 years after fall of communism April 23, 2014 FOX News

... The average life expectancy for deer is 15 years and none living now would have encountered the barrier... "But the border still plays a role for them and separates the two populations," ...

Think you know deer? Here’s the scoop November 23, 2014 Ohio, The Columbus Dispatch

Conventional wisdom holds 1 square mile is the size of a buck's home range. December 19, 2014 Pennsylvania, PSU Deer Study

... from September to October the average buck home range increases 55% in area. From almost 400 acres to just under a square mile (1 sq. mile = 640 acres). How about that? That square mile rule-of-thumb is right on! But female home ranges actually shrink from 400 acres to under 200 acres. A 48% decline in area...