DUNDAS COUNTY — Fostering the growth of bigger and fully mature bucks is one of the aims of an emerging movement that aims to educate rural Ontario landowners, farmers and hunters on how to best manage the wild white-tailed deer population living on their properties.
While the Quality Deer Management Association (QDMA) has been around the U.S. for about 30 years, the movement has only more recently made inroads into this province. Ontario’s third chapter — based in Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry — was set up just last month.
Strategies promoted by QDMA may include leaving small amounts of cropland unharvested through the winter to help famished bucks as well as changing Ontario’s deer-hunting culture to restore a more natural ratio of male and female deer.
According to Steve Elmy, president of the "Eastern Ontario" QDMA chapter — which takes in Hastings County as well as Lennox and Addington — the current hunting preference for bucks over does translates into a surplus of female deer on the ground and a shortage of males of the size and maturity that hunters dream of. The situation exacerbates itself as hunters pass up does in favour of bucks that are actually immature. These females then compete through the winter for the natural food stocks that the young bucks — having been run off their feet chasing the excessive numbers of females during the rutting season — need to survive.
The phenomenon also means that many does are getting pregnant later in the season, then giving birth to fawns too close to the following winter.
The bottom line is that, in Ontario, "80 per cent of all bucks killed are only one-and-a-half years old," says Elmy. "But a buck is not actually mature until it’s four years old."
He agrees that current provincial policy administered by the Ministry of Natural Resources also plays into the shortage of mature bucks.
MNR, he says, actually makes it more difficult for hunters to secure doe tags — making hunters go through an application process for those — while buck tags can be bought on the spot. The approach is exactly backwards from the point of view of restoring the population of big bucks, he argues.
At least one U.S. state has instituted a "doe for a buck" tag policy, requiring hunters to prove that they’ve shot a doe before being awarded a buck tag.
Elmy suggests QDMA chapters may advocate for such a policy in Ontario, and may also press MNR to track if issued tags produce kills in the field. MNR doesn’t know how many of the issued tags actually result in harvested deer — or their sexes — because it doesn’t collect those statistics from the hunters. But the ministry could easily do so, he says, pointing to the policy long employed for Ontario’s bear hunt.
"Let young bucks walk," he argues. "But the mentality is, if it’s brown, it’s down, and if it’s a doe, they don’t care, they’ll just shoot it," he says, referring to hunters that don’t consider if that doe is mothering a button buck fawn. "Well, not in my world."
As an example of the land management side, Elmy says he owns 88 acres and has an agreement with a renting farmer to leave a few rows of unharvested soybeans for the deer.
He also plants oak trees and small clearings of clover, and puts out small amounts of a specially formulated feed — which he sells through his company, Backyard Wildlife Products — all with an eye to helping wild deer through the winter.
And he’s often satisfied bagging a doe during hunting season because he’ll often get the antlers off a buck by finding them on his land after they’ve naturally dropped anyway. He calls the hobby "shed hunting."
At the new SD&G chapter, president Jim Picken says his group may initiate a study on deer population levels using cameras located on deer trails, to get a handle on population levels and the male-female ratio.
It’s an approach advocated by New Hampshire biologist Matt Ross, who spoke at the chapter’s founding meeting. Thirty people attended.
From the Archives:
News, November 2008
