How many deer are on your lease? How healthy are they? You can study the level of browsing on natural foods to find out.
It was hot in the woods, and mosquitoes rose in clouds each time a plant was disturbed.
On top of that, ticks crawled on anything with a pulse.
But Scott Durham was on his hands and knees, oblivious to the dangers of being sucked dry.“Privet, browsed,” Durham called out. “Water oak, present, unbrowsed. Poison ivy, present.”
Emile LeBlanc, standing beside Durham, scribbled in a small notebook.
Durham crawled a little farther, identifying plant after plant for LeBlanc to document.
The Department of Wildlife & Fisheries biologist worked his way along a straight line, marked with a 100-foot steel tape, cradling plants and pushing aside leaves to get better views of identifying characteristics.
“Trifoliate orange, browsed,” he said. “Look at this; they’re tearing it up.”
A few feet away, Chapman Jordan stood watching the process with fascination.
“I wanted to know the carrying capacity and how many does I would need to shoot to keep things healthy,” Jordan explained.
To accomplish that, he had called in Durham, the new state deer study leader, to perform a browse survey.
In the bargain, he got LeBlanc, who now heads up the department’s Deer Management Assistance Program, and Dave Moreland, who for years was the deer study leader and has recently become the head of DWF’s Wildlife Division.
It had all begun about 8 a.m., with the biologists gathering around an aerial map of the 1,500-acre tract of land in West Feliciana Parish.
“There’s a lot of big, old pines on the property, and the woods are getting pretty open,” Jordan told them. “I’m getting ready to do a thinning in most of those stands, and I’m going to clear-cut one area and replant in pines.”
Durham and LeBlanc studied the color map, asking pointed questions so they could visualize the lay of the land.
Finally, they straightened up and formulated a plan.
“I think we’ll do 10 transects,” Durham said. “We usually like to do one transect per 100 acres up to 10.
“That allows us to get a real good idea of what’s going on.”
A transect is simply a 100-foot line in the woods marked by the yellow tape.
Once the line is marked, every plant species within 2 1/2 feet on either side of the tape is noted, with further notation indicating whether or not deer had eaten part of it.
The survey lines are scattered throughout the property, with special attention paid to covering all available habitat types.
Most hunters have little understanding of natural browse, tending to think in terms of food plots and acorns.
But Moreland said natural browse is much more important to deer’s diets, since that’s all they usually have between February and November.
“Woody browse makes up 50 to 75 percent of their diet,” Moreland explained. “They’ll also be working on the herbacious species.”
That means that food plots, almost universally thought to help maintain deer health, are really pretty minor in terms of food sources.
“Unless you do it on a large scale, you’re not going to affect the quality of your deer,” Moreland said.
Jordan said he had just planted 25 acres of soybeans, but Moreland diplomatically explained that he probably wouldn’t see a lot of benefit.
“With 25 acres on 1,500, you’re basically just doing something to attract deer,” he said. “Unless you (plant food plots) on a large scale, you’re not going to effect the quality of your deer.”
But what does that really mean? Look through most any woods, and there are plenty of “woody” plants and seemingly unlimited supplies of vines, grasses and sprouts.
And, according to a book soon to be released by the Department of Wildlife & Fisheries, there are hundreds of species of which deer can make use. See sidebar for more information on the book “A Checklist of the Woody and Herbaceous Deer Food Plants of Louisiana.”
For example, herbaceous plants make up a major part of a deer’s diet, with 380 species of those plants being utilized.
Woody plants add another 210 species to the list of foods on a deer’s diet.
But all of those species aren’t available in all habitats and areas.
That means there’s really only a relatively small percentage of plants in any given area that are preferred deer foods.
That’s what the transect survey — a method developed by Moreland during his years of studying deer — is designed to look at.
“We choose key indicator plants,” Durham said. “We’re going to count every plant of that species, both browsed and unbrowsed, on the transect.
“That way, we know what percentage of that individual species was browsed.”
But biologists also note every single plant species “on the line” and whether or not there has been browsing by deer.
“You find out what deer are eating: How much are they being pushed to eat what’s not optimal browse,” Durham said.
Heavy browsing of less-desirable plants provides a good indication of a herd that’s out of balance with the habitat.
“It’s a piece of the puzzle,” LeBlanc explained. “It’s not the whole shooting match, though. You take the survey along with harvest data and other factors, and you can get a real good picture of what’s going on.
“The more pieces you have, the better the picture.”
But a thorough browse survey can be a very important part of the overall picture.
“Years and years of high browsing can lower your plant diversity,” Durham said.
And that tells biologists a story of high deer numbers.
The first place the biologists chose was a stand of mixed hardwoods and loblolly pine.
As everyone piled out of the truck, LeBlanc turned on a GPS and waited for the unit to lock onto satellites miles overhead.
“I can send the man a map showing exactly where we did transects,” he explained.
And then the crew pushed through the tangle of brush and briars along the edge of a trail.
“You don’t want to do a transect close to the edge of the woods,” Durham said. “You want to get far enough into the woods to get away from any edge effect.
“You want the transect to representative of the habitat.”
Thirty yards or so inside the woods, he picked a tree sapling and tied the end of his tape measure to it.
Durham then hiked 100 feet in a straight line.
“You want to be random about where you run a transect,” he said. “You want to kind of get a representation of what the woods look like.
“You don’t want to look around and say, ‘I see some browse right there. Let’s go there.’ You don’t want that.”
Biologists also take care not to line up their tape along a well-used game trail.
“We’ll try to avoid running one right down a deer trail so we don’t get an inordinately high amount of browse,” LeBlanc said. “We will cross one, but we don’t want to go right down one”
Durham and LeBlanc gazed upward, studying the trees.
“I’d call this overstory thick, with a moderate midstory,” Durham said.
LeBlanc agreed, and then they scanned the ground.
“Understory is sparse,” LeBlanc said.
The reason was pretty obvious: The trees were massive, with a thick canopy.
“There’s not much light getting to the ground,” Durham said. “I don’t expect to see much here.”
And with that, Durham squatted down and began calling out plant species and their condition relative to browsing.
Moreland, meanwhile, had drifted off.
While it seemed that he was just enjoying a day out of the office, Durham explained that he was performing a “walk-around.”
“Sometimes we do a walk-around to see what else is going on in the surrounding area,” he said.
And as Durham continued working his way down the line, Moreland meandered back through the woods.
“I’m not seeing a lot of activity,” he said before joining Durham on the ground.
The process went fairly quickly, finishing up in less than 10 minutes.
That’s mainly because there simply weren’t many plants in the 5-foot-wide target area.
“We only found six bites on that whole transect,” LeBlanc said.
That might appear to indicate very little activity, but Durham said you have to consider the amount of browsing compared to the availability of plants.
“Considering what (browse) we found there, that’s moderate browsing,” he explained.
The small group of men climbed back into Durham’s pickup, and headed to their next stop — a hardwood bottom with a little more light making it through the canopy to the ground.
The process was repeated, but this time there was much more vegetation on the floor of the forest.
Durham moved down the line as quickly as possible, and it was evident that more deer were utilizing the woods.
“Water oak, browsed. Smilax, browsed. Poison ivy, present,” he said.
The list of plant species grew, as did the count of “bites.”
At one point, Durham and LeBlanc crouched around a small plant, trying to determine whether or not the browsing had been by a deer or a rabbit.
“Rabbits have two sets of teeth, upper and lower, so they cut browse at a 45-degree angle,” LeBlanc said. “Deer tear it.”
It was finally determined that a rabbit had been at work, and Durham moved on.
“Obviously, we’re trying not to count those,” he said.
At the end of the 100-foot line, LeBlanc counted up the hits.
A total of 54 individual plants had been bitten by deer.
“I’d call this heavy,” LeBlanc said with a grin.
That didn’t necessarily mean that Jordan was looking at an overpopulation of deer, though.
“When you’re finished, this is all averaged out,” LeBlanc said. “That’s why you do 10 transects.”
Durham agreed.
“If we come with an average of about 30, we’d probably say you may have too many deer,” he explained.
But there was more work to do before making that call.
Over the next several hours, the group of men moved all over the property.
Surveys were performed in every kind of habitat from more-mature pines to hardwood bottoms to thickets growing in a storm-damaged area.
It was in those storm-damaged woods that the biologists found the heaviest browsing.
“Look at the hedging on this privet,” Moreland said, as Durham and LeBlanc pushed into the tangle of growth.
The shrub was about 3 feet high, and it looked like it had been shaped with pruning shears.
“The dark green is the old growth, and the light green is the new growth,” Moreland said. “They nip it off, and the plant tries to throw up some new shoots.”
Just how hard the deer had been hitting this one plant was pointedly illustrated by an untouched privet that stood right next to it — the one that hadn’t been touched by a deer stood almost 6 feet.
Durham and LeBlanc, meanwhile, had begun a transect in the middle of the tangle.
But things were weird in there.
“We’ve seen several things that don’t normally get hit,” LeBlanc said. “That indicates high use.”
Preferred browse like privet and trifoliate orange were neatly hedged by passing deer; there also were other unpreferred species like Chinese tallow that showed signs of heavy use.
“You don’t want to see that, especially in West Feliciana Parish,” Durham said. “That’s indicative of over-browsing.”
But he acknowledged that the transect in the thicket could be skewed.
“This is thicker than normal, so you’ll have a lot of deer in here,” Durham said.
Again, he reserved judgement until the allotted surveys had been completed.
On another transect through a hardwood stand, the biologists found that water oak saplings were the most-popular food for passing deer.
All but five of the 25 young water oaks found had been nibbled by deer.
“They’re using whatever good food they can find,” Moreland said.
And that’s what they found most places they stopped — if food availability was relatively low, deer would make do with whatever was there.
And that’s to be expected.
“They’re going to use what’s there,” Moreland said.
Finally, at about 4 p.m., Durham straightened for the last time, and the group headed back to camp.
While Durham said he needed to input the data into his computer for a final analysis, he agreed to share his initial thoughts with Jordan.
“I think it’s a great place and has a lot of potential,” Durham said. “It’s got a lot of potential to be world-class.”
Jordan asked about deer numbers, and Durham said there could be problems.
“I’d say there’s a high density (of deer) for the amount of food here,” Durham said.
Moreland agreed, but said it shouldn’t be a huge concern yet.
“You’re not at the point where you’re seeing overpopulation,” he said.
Durham nodded, but recommended that Jordan step up the number of deer killed from the lease.
“You don’t want to have any more deer on this place,” he said.
Jordan again mentioned the timber management planned for the summer, and LeBlanc said he thought that was a great idea.
“You come back here in a year, and you won’t believe the difference,” LeBlanc said. “You’ll have more browse than you can believe.”
And that really seemed to be the biggest problem — lack of natural food, even in the hardwood areas.
“You might want to come in and knock down some of the old oaks that are starting to be over mature and aren’t producing mast,” Moreland said.
He acknowledged that loggers usually wouldn’t want to mess with those trees, but Moreland said it would be worth the effort to grab a chain saw and topple the trees.
“You’ll open up the canopy and let some more light in,” he said. “That will encourage the growth of browse.”
That also would allow younger oaks to develop mast, increasing the amount of acorns available during the winter.
“What makes this place have such potential is the hard mast drop and the browse on the ground,” Durham said. “You want to keep that hardwood component.”
But all three biologists agreed that hunting pressure needed to be increased in conjunction with timber management.
Jordan said the 2004-05 take totaled fewer than 20 deer, with 15 of those being does.
Durham recommended that a lot more does be knocked down, even if the timber-management projects don’t happen.
“If you had the numbers of hunters, you could probably double that (doe kill) without hurting anything,” Durham said. “I’d easily say to do that.”
If the pines are thinned and some of the old, non-productive oaks get knocked down, the number of does killed could go even higher.
“If you start doing some timber work, even 30 does may not be enough,” Durham said.
In addition, the biologists recommended five to 10 bucks be taken every year.
“Normally, you can kill one good buck for every 200 acres,” Moreland said.
But Durham suggested culling some bucks, as well.
“This is the kind of place that if you see a 3-inch spike, you might want to take it,” he said.
Jordan said that didn’t fit in with his 15-inch 8-point rule, but Durham and LeBlanc said he might want to consider allowing those inferior bucks to be taken.
“If you’re only taking X number of does, you want to take bucks,” Durham said. “You have to take a certain number of deer off of this place, and that might be the only way to do it.”
LeBlanc agreed, going so far as to say spikes mistakenly killed for does shouldn’t be held against a hunter.
“To properly manage your herd, you’ve got to sustain a little collateral damage,” he said. “If a guy shoots a deer for a doe, and it’s got 2- to 3-inch spikes, don’t worry about it.
“Tell the man he did a good job, and tell him to go out and shoot a doe. You’ve got to have that flexibility.”
While Jordan wasn’t prepared to allow that (“You have to have rules”), he said the experience was extremely educational.
“I learned that everything’s OK, but I need to do some forestry work to open things up and promote more browse,” he said. “Also, that my deer aren’t overpopulated, but that I need to take a few more.”
And no matter what the final analysis of the browse survey shows, that’s the important information — knowing how to proceed with deer management.
That’s what Jordan now has to mull over.
“I’m really excited,” he said.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In the September issue, Chapman Jordan and other hunters will share their plans for managing their herds.