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
NOVEMBER 2015 • NEBRASKAland 27 Despite the herd growth to that point, a March 1949 report by the Commission showed that wildlife biologists had much to learn about deer management. "On the basis of present knowledge, there are no indications that the deer population of Nebraska will reach numbers great enough to warrant a statewide open season such as those in some states where many thousands of animals are harvested annually. Deer range in Nebraska will probably not support such numbers." In the fall of 1949, the state's second hunting season offered 1,500 permits for all or parts of six western and northwestern counties. All 910 deer harvested were mule deer. The area open to hunting increased gradually each year after that, and by winter 1955-56, deer had found their way to every county in the state, and in 1956, the total harvest was about 6,500. Nearly half of the harvest that year came from Pine Ridge, but that wasn't enough to appease landowners who were being overrun by a rapidly expanding herd. Desperate to get deer numbers in check, biologists issued 5,000 permits for each of two seasons in 1957. Hunters harvested 4,709 mule deer and 46 whitetails. That rapid growth and liberal harvest occurred in other regions as well, and by 1961, the entire state was opened to deer hunting. Because most mule deer live in remote locations where there are few roads, they are difficult if not impossible to count, but biologists estimate there are 75,000 mule deer in the state today. Changes in Habitat Mule deer roam throughout much of western North America, living in tundra, mountains, prairies and deserts from Alaska, if you include the black- tailed subspecies, to the Baja Peninsula and from Texas through the Dakotas and northwest into Canada and the edge of the Yukon Territory. Much of that country, including Nebraska, looks like it did when white man first visited more than 200 years ago, or even when deer were nearly extirpated 100 years ago. Nebraska was, for the most part, a treeless sea of grass, with western and Sandhills streams like the Loup and Dismal supporting a mix of buckbrush, plums, chokecherries and other shrubs that make up a large part of the diet of the mule deer, a browser that nibbles on leaves and twigs in the fall and winter and eats primarily forbs in the spring and summer, grazing a little on grass throughout the year. That diet changed, however, when pioneers started tilling Nebraska's soils and raising corn, wheat, beans, alfalfa and other crops. For the mule deer, Sporting velvet covered antlers in early June, a trio of mule deer bucks feed in a crop field on the edge of the forest in Dawes County at sunset. Bucks often hang in bachelor groups outside the rut.