NEBRASKAland Magazine is dedicated to outstanding photography and informative writing with an engaging mix of articles and photos highlighting Nebraska’s outdoor activities, parklands, wildlife, history and people.
Issue link: http://mag.outdoornebraska.gov/i/581251
28 NEBRASKAland • NOVEMBER 2015 this has been good news and bad. The good news is that the crops offered a high-energy food source that improved breeding success and winter survival, a factor that helped speed up their recovery in the state. Where there are crop fields, especially corn or wheat, adjacent to broad grasslands, you are sure to find mule deer nearby. But the conversion of native grasslands to cropland consumed large swaths of the mule deer's native habitat and pushed the edge of their range west. Mule deer were found as far east as Stanton County in the 1950s, and from Holt County west, mule deer outnumbered whitetails. By the mid- 1970s, that line had shifted westward to a line between Harlan and Cherry counties, a fact due to both a decline in mule deer and an increase in whitetail numbers. In the mid-1980s, some cropland was returned to grass through the USDA Conservation Reserve Program, restoring some habitat for mule deer. These grasslands have proven to be valuable as fawning areas, escape and winter cover and for food when planted to mixtures rich with forbs. High crop prices during the past decade, however, have led to decreasing enrollments in the program and the loss of nearly half of the 1.4 million acres that were enrolled at the peak in Nebraska. In areas where extensive conversion occurred, mule deer numbers have declined. There are still mule deer in many areas there once were, just fewer of them. Small populations live in isolated grasslands as far east as Stanton and Polk counties. The control of historic wildfires and flooding has also been good and bad for mule deer. Ponderosa pine forests in the Pine Ridge, Wildcat Hills and Niobrara River Valley, cedar forests in canyons in southwestern and central Nebraska, and woodlands in the bottomlands and in the hills near the Missouri and Platte rivers have expanded their reach and grown more dense. Where cedar trees have grown too thick for a mule deer's liking, especially along the Keya Paha, Niobrara and Missouri rivers in northeastern Nebraska and in the Loess Canyons of central and southwestern Nebraska, the species' range has been further reduced, a trend that continues in some places and is being abated in others. In the open grasslands, plant diversity has been reduced in the absence of fire and through herbicide use and grazing. While deer and livestock can coexist, grazing also reduces plant diversity and the amount of forbs. Overgrazing can ruin grasslands for cattle and deer. Disease Concerns The greatest threats to mule deer in Nebraska today are diseases and parasites that were not found here historically: chronic wasting disease, brainworm, EHD and chewing lice. EHD, epizootic hemorrhagic disease, was first identified in New Jersey in 1955, and has been seen in most states east of the Rocky Mountains since. Transmitted by a biting midge, it causes fever, hemorrhaging of internal organs and, in most cases, death. The disease is present at some levels each year, typically appearing in late summer, but is exacerbated by drought, which concentrates deer at remaining water sources, where midges can easily spread the virus from one deer to the next. The first severe outbreak of the disease in Nebraska killed 30 to 40 percent of the state's deer in 1976. Severe drought across Nebraska in 2012 fueled another outbreak that trimmed a third of the herd, mostly whitetails. While the disease primarily Wearing their scruffy summer coats in late May, a mule deer doe and yearling cross a field of crop stubble in Hayes County. While center pivots have proliferated much of southwestern Nebraska, the ruggedness of this canyon-laced country has preserved mule deer habitat, and the species is doing well. In other parts of the state, agriculture has replaced mule deer.