In my earlier essay The Good Life, I detailed some of my views I had on hunting, advances in weapons technology, the environment, and the common assumption of “living off the land”. Likewise, I have also included this topic and hinted at its implications in human survival during and after an economic collapse and civil war in my novel Operation SERF.
Two articles from the UK on the hunting of Robins recently caught my attention and I have revisited this topic again.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6867249/Robins-being-killed-and-eaten.html
More than one million songbirds, including Britain’s favourite Christmas bird the robin, are being killed and eaten every year in Cyprus, conservationists have warned.
….
Robins, song thrushes and other birds are then sold to restaurants where they are made into a Cypriot delicacy of pickled or boiled birds known as ambelopoulia. A helping for one person could be up to a dozen birds.
The traditional dish was first eaten centuries ago when it was difficult to get any other meat in Cyprus and has remained popular ever since, despite the demise in songbirds.
….
This autumn the RSPB estimated 700,000 birds were trapped, an increase of around 30 per cent from recent years.
The birds are migrating to Cyprus for Christmas to escape winter in the Ukraine and other areas of north east Europe, rather than Britain.
From Britain’s other leading newspaper:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6966737.ece
Snaring songbirds dates back to medieval times. The birds were considered necessary sustenance when meat was hard to get and expensive in Cyprus. In recent years, however, they have become gourmet fare, served as a delicacy known as ambelopoulia.
At the table they are generally gobbled down whole, after diners have spat out the feet and beak. Like the Queen of the nursery rhyme, two diners might eat four and twenty of the birds in a single sitting and pay €80 (£70) for the privilege.
[GardenSERF note: That's $112 --priced far above the subsistence-living budget for most people.]
….
Trapping birds with mist nets or lime sticks is strictly outlawed by international conventions because of their indiscriminate nature. Falcons have been found in poachers nets, as have endangered birds such as the Cyprus scops owl. The practice persists, however, because it is so lucrative.
….
How to cook our feathered friends
Catch 12 robins, using mesh nets or by trapping them on twigs dipped in a sticky substance made from local fruits
Pluck them. Fry them whole in olive oil, or boil them (for 30 minutes) in stock of pourgouri (cracked wheat)
Yes, the same article which states the methods used to catch them are illegal then goes into how to snare and cook them. All this coming from newspapers which helped pushed for various types of hunting bans in the UK. I have yet to see a mainstream American newspaper condemn poaching, then describe deer shining followed by a recipe. (I’ll save my tasty recipes for a future post).
As you have read in my previous essay, I’m an avid hunter. This will not be a post against hunting, but I would hope some of the issues I raise on conservation give my fellow hunters something to chew on and digest for a while. Likewise, considering the main (and often only) plan of many survivalists from both the older generations and the current crop of young adults who are about to hit difficult economic times is to “live off the land”, this topic continues to require serious consideration.
Rather than birds, I’ve decided to take aim at a single animal in American which has been my favorite prey: whitetail deer. Due to time constraints, I can’t collect and collate data on every game animal in every state. I would encourage people to gather more information in their own areas and advise that learning how to interpret statistics is just as important a skill as learning to hit a target and skinning wild game.
I would caution people everywhere, especially my fellow hunters, to not rely on the anecdotal evidence of “I see plenty of deer when I’m outside.” The reasons for this I’ve already stated in The Good Life. My additional warning to survivalists I pose only as a simple question: What happens to the population of game animals in your area when those animals are the only source of food and every human living in your area is also hunting them?
(For more consideration of hunting as a means for survival, please refer to Operation SERF.)
Let’s continue with some articles on the deer population.
http://www.timberjay.com/detail/6095.html?sub_id=6095&print=1
Hunters in northern St. Louis and Lake counties may have to spend a bit more time in their stands when the 2009 firearms deer season gets underway next Saturday.
Wildlife officials with the Department of Natural Resources say the area’s deer population is back to more traditional levels, due to the combined effects of liberal bag limits in recent years and typically cold winters.
“The local deer herd has been thinned by two consecutive moderately-severe winters, predators, and aggressive antlerless deer harvest over the past five years,” stated Tower Area Wildlife Manager Tom Rusch. Fawn production has also been reduced, he said.
As a result, most hunting units are now at or slightly below population goals set for each area in 2005.
….
This year’s reduced harvest projection comes on the heels of several years of exceptional deer harvests in the region. Liberal antlerless regulations, which had been in effect through last year, produced the five all-time highest deer harvests in just the past six years. Last year was the third consecutive time that the antlerless harvest topped buck harvest in the area.
….
The statewide outlook will also be quite different than the previous five years, as the state’s deer population has been trimmed to approximately 1.2 million animals.
Two quick asides:
There are 1.2 million deer and over 5 million people in that state. Do the math.
Also, unusually harsh weather has been known to kill off many animals in a single season. Small game animals like rabbits and pheasants are even more affected. Now factor in an unforeseen situation (extreme weather, disease, starvation due to crop loss, dehydration due to long drought, etc.) which reduces the deer population by 25% and do the math for over 5 million people.
Let’s continue on with other people who’ve noticed a regional decline in their deer population:
http://kennebecjournal.mainetoday.com/view/columns/7170818.html
Where have the deer gone?
Saturday’s drizzle was a fitting finish for the firearms season on deer, a drizzly discouraging hunt with all of hunting’s blessings except for the target species. They’ve gone missing.
And the lack of deer has great implications for both hunters and nonhunters.
In the area I hunt, deer numbers must be down by at least 50 percent. The one day we had snow, I saw more tracks of coyotes than deer. Hunting the entire month of November, I did not see a deer.
….
The wildlife department’s current deer biologist, Lee Kantar, predicted this season’s harvest would be “scary,” the lowest in decades. Final figures may show that Kantar was optimistic.
In Mount Vernon, less than a decade after tagging 217 deer, the Country Store had registered just 50 at the end of the firearms season on deer on Saturday.
You should care about this because the impact of the loss of deer on Maine’s economy and the fish and wildlife department is substantial.
Other reports from around Maine bear this out as well:
http://maineoutdoorjournal.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=298191&ac=Outdoors
Except for southern Maine, deer hunting reports everywhere speak of a thinned herd, and in northern Maine it may well be at historically low levels.
Biologist Richard Hoppe is thankful for each week of mild weather. Every week that the temperatures stay above freezing and the land is without snow, Hoppe said, the better the chances that Maine’s northern herd will get through the winter in fair numbers.
….
“Maybe a reduction in season or closure of season. How can we jump-start this herd?” Hoppe said. “In fact, I’m under the impression that what we have is what we’ve got in reference to habitat. That’s the limiting factor up here in northern Maine (for deer) and we can’t change what we have on the landscape, what there is for wintering habitat. That’s our problem.“
While there is vast forestland in Aroostook County, the historic deer yards used by whitetails that the deer return to each winter have been fragmented by roads and timber harvesting, Hoppe said.
There are as many as 100 percent more roads than there were 30 years ago, he said.
The yards have shrunk, forcing large deer herds to struggle with less winter protection. And the last two winters were hard on the herd, Hoppe said.
I find some irony that the reason people (usually non-hunters) often give for there being the same or more deer than ever is the occasional sight of a dead deer on the road. If there are more roads with dead deer on them, it simply means there might be more opportunities to see dead deer –not that there is a larger living herd. A basic understanding of statistics would help improve this common heuristic.
Moving on to Montana –one of the prime locations often cited for the hunting and/or survival retreat lifestyle:
http://www.leaderadvertiser.com/articles/2009/12/04/news/doc4b16a43ea57a5880729161.txt
Deer harvest lowest in decade
Results at the six northwest Montana check stations indicated that the 2009 hunting season was one of the slowest since 1997.
At the six check stations for the season, 22,932 hunters checked 1,138 white-tailed deer (797 of these were bucks versus 876 last year), 193 mule deer, and 153 elk for a 6.5 percent rate of hunters with game. This is lower than the 7.6 percent rate of hunters with game last year. Mule deer harvest was the lowest on record. Elk harvest was about the same as the last few years.
Biologists pay close attention to the whitetail buck harvest because that hunting regulation is consistent from year to year. This year’s whitetail buck count at the check stations of 797 was the lowest since 1997.
From long-term whitetail deer research in Northwest Montana, biologists know that buck harvest is the best indicator of population trend. Buck harvest at the check stations gives a preview of the overall harvest survey conducted by phone this winter.
“Based on our check station results, it appears as though the whitetail deer population is still declining,” said FWP Wildlife Manager Jim Williams.
Williams said the whitetail population has been declining for the last two or three years, and that FWP had already implemented more restrictive hunting regulations for this past hunting season. Williams listed several factors for the decline including back-to-back, long, cold winters in some parts of the region resulting in poor fawn survival. This showed up in significantly fewer yearlings brought through most check stations this fall.
Predation from mountain lions and wolves, and hunting antlerless deer also affect deer populations.
“We need a strong fawn crop to survive the winter before we will see significant recovery of the whitetail population,” Williams said.
….
The actual game harvest and hunter success by hunting district will be available in spring as determined by a detailed phone survey of licensed hunters. The check station numbers given above represent only a sample of the total harvest in each hunting district, but trends are usually similar.
However, there are differing interpretations as to what lower deer numbers might mean within a population as far as quality:
http://www.iowagameandfish.com/hunting/whitetail-deer-hunting/IA_1109_01/
Fewer Deer, More Trophies?
As noted last month in Iowa Game & Fish magazine’s annual deer hunting forecast, Iowa’s deer population is declining. That’s good, a result of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources’ carefully designed strategy of using regulations to manipulate hunting pressure and adjust local deer populations to match the carrying capacity of local habitat.
The knee-jerk reaction among deer hunters is that a smaller population of deer reduces the potential for trophy bucks. IDNR deer management biologist Tom Litchfield says the opposite may be true for Iowa. “Bringing deer numbers down from the highs we saw a few years ago actually enhances the possibility of more bucks reaching their full potential,” he said. “Studies have shown that bucks don’t express their maximum (antler) potential when local populations are high.”
Chuck Steffen, wildlife management biologist in far southeast Iowa, agrees: “When we had a lot of exceptional trophy deer coming out of this area, it was back when the herd was still growing and we didn’t have as many deer as we have now. There’s a saturation point, where after you get too many deer in an area, there doesn’t seem to be as many really huge bucks.“
Steffen, Litchfield and other deer management experts emphasize that the progressive attitude of Iowa’s deer hunters has played a significant role in developing Iowa’s world-class population of trophy whitetail bucks. Iowa’s hunters have bought into the philosophy of passing up small bucks, shooting does for venison and harvesting only older, mature bucks.
The last comment above puts the entire “we have a smaller deer population, but bigger bucks because of it” into context. It’s not the smaller population of deer causing bigger bucks to appear, it’s the current hunting attitude of waiting till the available bucks are bigger. Also, sport hunting of one species when other foods (animal or plant) are easily available has a far different mindset associated with it than hunting for total sustenance and survival does.
One problem within the DNR ranks may be the longstanding interpretation of hunters bagging more deer as an indication of total deer population. If the number of deer tagged each year increases, they assume the deer population has also increased. Although this is a quote from 1987, the perception and often the measure of the population via hunter success reflect this assumption:
http://articles.mcall.com/1987-04-30/news/2579019_1_antlerless-harvest-antlerless-deer-deer-hunters
“Claims that our deer population is declining are completely refuted by reports filed by successful hunters,” Dale Sheffer, game management bureau director, said in announcing that 150,359 bucks and 149,655 antlerless deer were tagged during the 1986-87 seasons.
….
The record buck harvest last year was somewhat of a surprise. Normally, the commission’s harvest projections are on the conservative side but about 13,000 more antlered deer were harvested in 1986 than had been projected.
“This simply confirms our position that there are lots of deer in Pennsylvania,” Sheffer said.
Last year was the seventh straight year in which buck report cards exceeded the 70,000 mark. Of the 24 most successful buck seasons in Pennsylvania’s history, 23 have occurred in the last 23 years. Sheffer points out that hunters can’t take whitetails which don’t exist and to maintain large harvests over a long period of time shows the deer are there, despite observations to the contrary by some hunters.
Again, fallacies abound in the interpretation above. Many factors to consider would be the number of hunters in the field, increasing skill of those hunters, and in my opinion advances in weapon technology which increases the likelihood that the hunter will hit the target.
The advances in optics alone are of prime importance. Likewise, large caliber ammunition for practice both in 1986 and in 2009 was and still is relatively more affordable than it would have been in decades past. This has allowed for more shooters to hone their skills than past generations could have afforded. As a result more people are able to effectively hit more targets at longer ranges. Combine this with advances in computer simulations and practice effect on skill is also increased. This has only been the case for the last 10 years on a mass scale and its effects are only now beginning to be gauged in the field (both for the sport of hunting and human warfare).
I’ve given you a few things to consider on the the topic of Limits to Living Off the Land. If I wanted to bring an additional layer of complexity to this topic, I could add in a disease for deer such as CWD and how it might further decimate the population of the future herd. And, for the birds first mentioned, I could also add in avian flu.
Until that time when further complexity is needed to make a point, I will leave it as is for today.
No comments:
Post a Comment