Study Area
Conditions of the land and deer population greatly impact food and cover, so we need to describe the location of our work. All landowners within our 50,000-acre study area shared the goal of producing older bucks for recreational harvest, with an adult sex ratio of 1 buck to 1–2 does. Within our study area, hunter harvest was the leading cause of mortality in adult bucks, but other causes included vehicle collision, epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD), and poaching. The annual survival rate ranged from 60 to 75 percent. White-tailed deer are flexible in their habitat requirements and can respond rapidly to environmental changes, which allows them not just to survive but thrive in a variety of landscapes. Deer thrive throughout our study area of private land holdings along the Big Black River in Mississippi (Figure 1). Some call it a “deer factory” because the area produces lots of deer and big deer. Our study area included a diversity of vegetation types common in the southeastern United States. Land cover was dominated by two major groups, forest and agriculture, with forest cover being the most abundant. Natural vegetation types were upland deciduous forests, pine plantations, herbaceous vegetation (fields), and bottomland deciduous forests. Bottomland deciduous forests border the Big Black River and cover about 38 percent of the area. Food supplies are important to deer, and the amount of available forage varies among the vegetation types. There was not a lot of forage available in the upland deciduous forests. Managed pine plantations were commercial loblolly pine stands, in which canopy closure limits forage supply during much of the stand rotation. Forages were abundant in herbaceous areas during spring and summer, but by hunting season, a lot of the forage was dead or of very low quality. The bottomland deciduous forests were mostly mature hard-woods with a good concentration of oaks; but their closed canopy limited forage growth on the ground, so their main food attraction was acorns. Commercial agriculture fields were the second most common vegetation type and covered about 30 percent of the study area, with crops including corn, cotton, and soybeans. All agriculture fields were harvested by the start of hunting season, so they were essentially barren fields with very little, if any, available forage or cover during fall. Landowners planted food plots on about 1,000 acres (2 percent of the area) to supplement natural forage during winter or summer. Summer food plots were planted with high-quality soybeans or deervetch. Deervetch lasted until the first frost in December, so, in addition to a lot of high-quality forage, the height of the deervetch vegetation pro-vided hiding cover during hunting season. Winter food plots consisted of oats and clover but did not reach a height that supplied cover during the hunting season (Figure 2). Some landowners also used gravity and/or spin feeders. Spin feeders contained corn, while gravity feeders provided full-ration pellets.
Long time dawg here! Coach Leach passing away hurt the football program worse than we thought would. Helluva guy too! I'm hoping the new HC can turn us around. Please tell me you're not a longhorn?!
