 Yeah, so thanks everyone for coming. As this says, I'm going to talk about the winter ecology of white-tailed deer, which quite literally is how do deer survive winter, right? A few key elements in this that I'm going to go through, some of their adaptations, how they use wintering areas, what wintering areas are, and why they're important, and then a few other sort of peripheral elements that I'll get into. So to start off, deer have an annual weight cycle. So in the summer, deer are pretty thin. There's no benefit in being fat in the summer. You get hot. So deer are always thin in the summer. Come fall and early winter, they're plump. They put on a lot of fat in the fall. So deer put on a lot of fat in the fall. Fall's a good time to put on a lot of fat. There's a lot of high-energy food out there. So going into winter, as much as 30% of a deer's body weight can be fat. So you can almost think of the way they get through winter as just like a bear gets through winter. They stock up a lot of fat, and they kind of ride through. By the end of winter, they don't have much fat. A very interesting adaptation of deer. And this only works for northern deer. So if you took a deer from Georgia and brought it up here, it wouldn't gain nearly as much fat in the fall. Hardly any, really. But more importantly, if you take a northern deer, put it in captivity, and feed it all the food it wants. High-quality grain, high-quality food, it will still lose weight in the winter. That's how ingrained this evolutionary cycle is. They're going to do it, no matter what. So what ends up mattering with winter really is how long is winter? Do they make it the spring come before they run out? Because no matter what they eat in the winter, they're going to lose weight. So does spring come early enough? So they still have fat by the time they get there. And this is actually from my graduate work at the University of New Hampshire. So this is fawns. What this is is the percentage of deer, in this case, with no marrow fat loss. No marrow fat loss means they're not starving. As soon as an animal loses marrow fat, they're considered in starvation, essentially, at that point. They're malnourished. So this is the percentage of deer that are doing OK. And you see, as winter progresses, fewer and fewer are doing OK. The blue line is fawns. The gray line is adult deer, adult females, in this case. You can see that fawns start to decline sooner. That should kind of make sense. They're smaller, right? But also, if you think of a fawn here in the north, it's putting all of its energy in that first summer of its life into getting big enough to get through winter. It can't store fat. It doesn't have any extra energy to put into storing fat. It's just trying to grow body size. Whereas an adult deer isn't growing body size, it just puts fat on. As long as no one falls asleep, this will be good. So that's one adaptation of deer, is that annual fat cycle. Another adaptation sort of behavioral, sort of physiological is that they reduce their energy expenditure in winter. Early research kind of thought this was like almost a semi-hybrid nation where they actually lower their metabolism. Turns out we've learned that that's not really true. Their metabolism is lower because it's forced to be lower, because they can't move as much because of the snow and they can't eat as much because there's not that much food out there. And so as a result, their metabolism ends up being a little slower. But it's not like their choice. It's just the reality of what they have to do. So they tend to be a lot more sedentary in the winter. Another key adaptation is something called Bergman's Rule. This is a broad rule in ecology where as you go north, individuals of a certain species get bigger. And that being larger helps you deal with cold. You have a surface area to volume ratio thing. So you have less surface to how much insides you have, and that helps you stay warm. That's why northern animals tend to be bigger than southern animals. This is a graphic I stole off the internet, that's why it's on bears. But it's true with deer, too. So these are skulls from a full grown adult buck in Michigan and a full grown adult buck in Nicaragua. So whitetail deer range extends into South America. But they're way smaller in the South. We actually even see this in the state of Vermont. An average, we see it mostly in yearling deer, but an average yearling buck in northeastern Vermont will be about 10 pounds heavier than an average yearling buck in Bennington County. And that's because they have to survive harder winters. Along the lines of size, I mentioned that fawns lose weight because they don't have a chance to store fat. They have to put it into body growth. That's also size is also their sort of enemy in winter. Adults get big. Fawns are half the size. And so they're more susceptible to cold. They have more trouble dealing with deep snow. And if there's a browse line, they have a harder time reaching available food. So fawns really suffer more than anyone else during the winter, primarily because of their body size. Another sort of key adaptation of deer is their hair coat. So a deer's hair coat allows them to stay warm, to stay comfortable, down to about 15 degrees. So they don't need to increase their metabolism at all to maintain body heat down to about 15 degrees. That means they're comfortable at 15 degrees. We get a sunny 50 degree day. A deer with this winter coat is probably overheating. They're probably going to seek shade. There's another interesting adaptation that we call the heat increment of digestion, which is a fancy way to say that deer like a cow, they have a rumen. And so most of their digestion happens from bacteria in their gut. That process produces heat. And so by having a full stomach digesting their food, they produce additional heat. That allows deer, on average, to be comfortable down to about zero degrees. So they don't need to increase their energy expenditure to stay warm until the temperature gets below zero. And the last adaptation, and these pictures are a bit, maybe, graphic for people who don't like blood and guts, but deer are able to delay development of fetuses in the winter. So those are pregnant in the winter. They breed in November. They give birth in first week of June. They're pregnant in the winter. So they have that additional energy stress. But 90% of the fetal, the growth of that fetus, the energy that goes into producing a fetus, 90% of that energy occurs in the third trimester, which starts about April 1. So almost all of the energy to grow fetuses happens in the spring when there's lots of highly nutritious forage out there. And so it's not draining on a doe when she's trying to survive in the winter. Probably the most important adaptation deer have to survive on her is not physiological. It's behavioral. And that is they migrate. In Vermont, they don't tend to migrate very far. But almost all of our deer migrate from their summer range, at least shift, if you want to call it that, but migrate from summer range to winter range. In Vermont, we call those areas deer wintering areas or deer yards, colloquially. The known deer yards we have, and this is what we have mapped, the green areas there, currently we know our mapping is not great. It was first done back in the 80s. It's updated as we get a chance to. Some of those areas are no longer functional. Some new areas are now functional deer yards that aren't represented on the map. But the point is, the key part is, these areas represent about 12% of all deer habitat in the state. So for some perspective, if we have, right now we think we have about 18 deer per square mile statewide. But to use simple numbers, let's say we have 20 deer per square mile statewide. We're going to concentrate all of those deer into 12% of their habitat for three to five months. That works out to about 300 and 320, 330 deer per square mile for those three to five months. That's why winter is limiting in Vermont. We don't have high deer densities, and we'll never have high deer densities, because we have absurdly high deer densities for a few months a year, because they're limited to a small portion of their habitat. That's why we protect these areas. They're considered critical wildlife habitat under Act 250 or Act 240 or Section 248, but energy development, regulatory reviews. We also kind of have this fortuitous agreement with our two chip power plants, biomass power plants in Vermont, at Burlington Electric and at Rygate. So any timber harvest that sells chips to either of those places gets reviewed by our department, and so we can avoid any impacts to deer yards from those potential timber harvest. The simple reality, though, is the vast majority of development doesn't fall under Act 250, and the vast majority of timber harvest don't sell chips to either of those places. So most, if someone has deer yard on their property and they want to clear cut it or do whatever to it, there's really no way to stop them, but we do whatever we can to protect these habitats. So this is what we have mapped in the local area. We are somewhere in here. We have a lot of deer yard mapped, but this is where I say, like, there are probably areas that function as deer yard that we don't have mapped. This nice softwood area here may well function as a deer yard, but didn't at the time this mapping was done. What we have a lot of in Vermont, what we have mapped as deer yard frequently in Vermont, are old field pine. So these are almost all conifer stands, right? But when Vermont kind of, when our forest came back, when agriculture was abandoned, forest came back, a lot of those old fields and pasture came back to pine, and they're kind of ugly looking pine that grew out in an old pasture. And when those trees are young to middle age, they provide decent cover for deer. So back in the 80s, when this mapping was initially done, those areas were the right age to provide good cover. Most of those pine stands are now getting to the point where they're too old, the trees get real thin as they get tall, they're no longer good cover for deer. So a lot of our mapped deer yards, while there still may be a few deer in them, are not as high quality as they used to be. I don't know if that's necessarily the case here, but I would bet a lot of these areas are that. The best deer yards we have in this part of the state are hemlock stands. Hemlock is a long-lived tree, provides great cover, also provides food. Wonderful, wonderful deer yard habitat. So kind of as I was alluding to, these deer yards are areas, generally areas of dense conifer cover. The reason deer like these areas is it provides a break from that deep snow that's out in the open, right? You go under conifer trees, snow depths are a lot lower. So a lot easier for deer to get around under there. It also blocks the wind, it also provides a roof, which actually helps with radiant cooling. So they actually can stay warmer by being under conifer trees than being out in the open. On those real cold nights, it makes quite a difference. As I said, the conifers kind of hold up the snow. The toughest part for deer in the winter is deep snow, right? That's why they're in these areas, because it's basically the only places they can get around. So anywhere that reduces snow depths tends to be where deer winter. Actually in Southwestern Vermont, parts of Rutland and Bennington County, we have a fair number of deer yards that are actually just on a steep, south-facing hardwood slope. That's because they don't get as much snow down there and those steep, south-facing slopes get a lot of sun. And so the snow depths tends to be lower there. So they don't have the same shelter from wind and everything else, but there's no snow. Like I said, deer don't like moving around. When the snow's deep, we tend somewhere between 15 and 18 inches of snow on the ground. It's typically when we would say deer are yarded or we would call yarding conditions. That's generally the point at which the snow really becomes restrictive for deer. Coincidentally, it's roughly the belly height of deer. That's not why it becomes restrictive, but that's about when we see deer fully in the deer yards and not kind of spreading out when they can. So often in these areas, for a multitude of reasons, food is limited, right? So because it's dense conifer cover, there's not a lot of light that gets through, so there's not much growing underneath anyway. And then if you've had high numbers of deer in there for decades in the winter, they've probably eaten everything that's alive. And they continue to year after year after year after year after year. And so food can be very limiting. Often see, you know, browse lines in deer yards. You see really scrubby looking, heavily browsed trees. This deer is feeding on a balsam fur. They will eat balsam fur. It's not high quality food. They would prefer hardwood, brows, cedar, is really high quality. The problem this creates, again, disadvantageing fawns is that smaller deer can't reach those browse lines. But again, cover is far, far more important than food, right? The deer have fat, they're gonna lose weight regardless. There's actually, one of the early papers published on how deer survive winter is called sledding on a brushy hillside. And the whole paper is an analogy of how deer get through winter. Basically they're starting at the top of the hill, nice and fat, and they're in a sled, right? Going down. The more food they have, the slower that sled's gonna go down the hill. But it's still gonna go down the hill. If there's no food, no brows, no brushy stuff, they're gonna go pretty fast. So food is important in that it slows the descent, but you still need the cover. If they lose the roof, one of our biologists likes to say that you don't trade the roof for the pantry. The roof is more important, because the extra energy deer will expend to stay warm, to shelter from the weather, to deal with deep snow in getting food. The food is not nutritious enough to make up for that extra energy that they're spending. So they're better off just hunkering down in a place without a lot of snow, where they can save energy, and just being hungry for several months. We do recommend that if people are going to do timber harvest or any work on their property, and they're next to a deer yard, do it in the winter if you can. That does provide extra food, and if it's adjacent to cover, that's gonna be very good for the deer. This is a very old picture of a timber harvest up in the Northeast Kingdom. Obviously, there are a lot of deer taking advantage of the tops left in this timber harvest. That's food they wouldn't normally have. So I will say, I guess, now that I just thought of this, one of the other sort of really important things to keep in mind with deer yards, and particularly the cover in deer yards, is that one of the, a critical food source for deer in the winter is what we call litter fall. So it's not brows growing. It's the stuff that breaks off trees and falls from wind storms and snow load and whatever. The twigs are up high in the trees. In some cases, that can be as much as 50% of their diet in the winter. The beautiful part of that is, no matter how much they browse everything underneath, that's always there, right? That's always falling because the source is always there. So that's why we really urge people, the cover is more important. It does actually provide some food while it's being covered, especially when it's a species like hemlock or fur that they can eat. Pine doesn't really offer much. Spruce is essentially inedible to deer. So your best species are, again, hemlock. Cedar is ideal, but cedar's pretty uncommon. And then balsam fur. So an obvious sort of, or a thing that comes up all the time is that all right, if deer are struggling through winter, if they're kind of food limited, why don't we just feed them, provide them some supplemental food? Won't that help more of them get through the winter? And that seems completely logical, right? You're gonna offer them food that they wouldn't otherwise have, that should help them. The reality is it doesn't. There's an abundance of research on this. The only way you get any nutritional benefit from supplementary feeding deer in the winter is in super intensive massive feeding programs where you're essentially farming deer in the winter. Tons and tons of grain. Even at that level, in a northern place like Vermont where in a hard winter, those deer are gonna expend so much more energy getting to a feed site. Dealing with, there's a bunch of other reasons, but basically they're gonna expend energy getting there. They're gonna expend energy fighting with each other. They're not going to a traditional deer yard. Also important, they learn where deer yards are, right? There's an innate drive to move when it starts snowing in the fall, or when it gets cold enough or whatever. There's an innate drive to move to better cover, but they learn where to go. And if deer have gone to a feed site their whole life and that person moves or dies or for whatever reason stops feeding, the deer are still gonna show up and there's no cover there. Now there's no food there. That has serious negative consequences, obviously only for a local herd, but that happens a lot. We have sort of an interesting thing right now where we've had, at least in parts of Vermont, three pretty easy winters in a row. My boss lives in Shrewsbury, which is almost, he's almost up at 2,000 feet in the Green Mountains. Never has deer and winter near his house, except he has for the past three years because it hasn't been that hard down there. This year is a pretty hard winter. He still has deer there because they don't know where else to go. Those deer have never learned to go to an actual deer yard. One of the risks of having really variable winters. Another problem with supplemental feeding, aside from the fact that it doesn't actually help deer, is that it can hurt deer. So this is obviously an incredibly unnatural concentration of deer. That sort of nose-to-nose feeding, particularly on the ground, is a wonderful way to spread disease. Luckily, our deer herds in the Northeast are pretty disease-free, but where we to get disease, where any sort of disease or parasite to get into a group like this, it would spread through all of them, really, really quickly. You know, I mentioned sort of one of the energetic expenditures here. In this photo down here, you see this deer does not look comfortable, nor does that one. There's a lot of aggression. Deer have hierarchies. The dominant deer get to eat. The subordinate deer do not at a feed site. Subordinate deer are usually fawns. What you often see at feed sites is that the adults get through winter pretty well, but the fawns all starve still because they're not getting any food. And the deer still browse all around there so there's nothing fawns can eat for natural vegetation because they can't reach any of it. And that aggression also, there's energy and stress involved in that. And that causes them to burn their fat reserves quicker than they would normally. In addition, feeding usually happens next to someone's house, which is always next to a road. And that causes deer to cross roads more than they would in the winter. And when deer cross roads more, they get hit by cars more. Some big feed sites in Maine, in New Hampshire, where they still allow that, their biologists estimate they lose as many or more deer to motor vehicle collisions than would possibly be saved by feeding. And you can imagine in the middle of winter and deer get on a road, they don't really wanna jump up into that snow bank. They probably get stuck for a while. So roads are a bad thing for deer. And as I mentioned earlier, if winter's too long or exceedingly hard at certain points, if we have a lot of snow for a long period of time or a really long periods of cold weather, ultimately, deer starve. And in hard winters, in long winters, and we've had years where we've lost probably 30% of our deer population in the winter. So fully, almost a third of the deer can die in a really hard winter. In an average winter in Vermont, we'll probably lose around 15% of our deer. So every year, deer are gonna die in the winter. They die of a lot of causes. They don't all starve as these deer did in these pictures. Some get killed by predators. More of them get hit on the road in the winter. They die of a lot of causes, but it's all winter related. It is the limiting factor for our deer population in Vermont and everywhere across the northern edge of deer range. But usually, spring comes early enough. And so we see this a lot in the spring. Call this breakout. This is, you know, these deer are hungry in the spring. There's finally open ground. I lived down near Rutland. It's looked like this for the last two weeks down there. That's why winter is pretty easy down there. But in most of the state, when those deer haven't had a chance to see anything like this for three or four months, you'll often see big groups of deer come out in these fields that are next to deer yards in the spring. And that's a good sign. At that point, they've made it. So we do monitor how hard winters are and how that affects deer. We keep track of something we call winter severity index. And this is what it looks like for the past 30 years. The orange line is the average. Our winter severity index tracks the number of days where there's 18 inches of snow on the ground. Again, that's that kind of limiting level for deer. And the number of days where the temperature drops below zero. Like I said earlier, that's the point where that sort of energetic increase needs to happen for them to stay warm. So they're good measures of the impact of winter weather on deer. And this does an amazing job of predicting change in the deer population. In part because we've tracked it through time and we understand what to expect from it. Generally speaking, if we see a winter severity index of 50 or higher, our deer population will decline. We will lose more deer than we gain from fawns being born. If it's below 50, unless we harvest enough, handling less deer, we will usually see an increase. As you can see, the last three have been well below. 2016 was actually the mildest winter easiest winter for deer we've ever measured. And this goes, we tracked this back to 1970. They've been doing well the last three years and that's why we have quite a few deer right now in most of the state. This winter is kind of interesting so far. We always see differences across Vermont. So this is current snow depths as of today. In the Northeast, all the green is two feet or more on the ground. But you can see all of Western Vermont has less than eight inches on the ground. And most of that fell last night. Whereas the mountains and central and northern Vermont has been two feet in as two feet of rock hard, solid snow that's been there for a long time. In particular, the November we had this year was probably the worst we've had in certainly my lifetime. You know, I have a deer camp up in Essex County and I was hunting in knee-deep snow in mid-November. Deer up there moved to wintering areas two weeks earlier than they normally do. If they're able to then come out, that's okay. But if they have to stay in there from mid-November on, we're gonna lose more deer than we would expect because they're in there longer than we would expect. For perspective, biologists generally consider 90 days to be about the limit deer can spend in the deer yard. Beyond 90 days, you really start losing deer fast. So if you start in mid-November, 90 days is mid-March. It's not very likely deer in Essex County are gonna be out of deer yards in mid-March. That's why we only have five deer per square mile in Essex County. Winners are hard. But it's also why we have a ton of deer on the western side of the state. Winners are easy. So that's what I have. So at this point, if anyone has questions about this, about any other deer-related stuff, I'm happy to answer. No questions? Yeah, go ahead. In our wooded area, just the adjacent property owners is doing a big timber harvest. I was amazed at how fast the deer got in there. I mean, they're just like, wow, this is crazy. You mentioned twigs falling out of the trees from wind. Those are mostly dead though. Well, dead stuff, but you'll get a lot of green stuff that falls, and the more important part of it is, it doesn't seem like a lot as it falls. It's a thing here, and they'll actually eat dead leaves too, but the important part of it is, as the snow begins to melt in late winter, all of that stuff starts exposing itself. And so they've eaten all the stuff that's growing. And so at that point, they're getting this stuff that's melting out of the snow in late winter, which was green when it fell and has been sort of preserved in the snow and then is providing them a little extra food in late winter. But we're grinding the dead things. The lichens that grow on dead twigs are incredibly nutritious for deer. Yeah, there's a lot of that. To the point where the deer get nothing from it, it's so nutritious that the bacteria in their gut eat it all, but it makes the bacteria in their gut happy, which helps them digest their other food better. But so that lichen is incredibly important for them. So getting back to this timber harvest, is there a preferred species? Maple, ash, cherry, or something that tops the twigs that they're after, obviously? All of those. All of those. As a general rule, and I think most foresters would tell you this. Anything that's of high commercial value, deer love. If it's worthless from a commercial perspective, deer don't want to eat it. Yeah, so those species are good. Like, beech, black birch they don't care for, but yeah, they love maple and ash, cherry less. So like white birch and yellow birch they love too. Any hardwood usually is okay. Well, they were having a picnic and they didn't even care if I was there. Oh, I know. Yeah. They were like, oh, no. Normally we run from you, but we're... Yeah, and now you see that, that's sort of that reducing energy expenditure in the winter. They're not running unless they have to run. In fact, do coyotes have? Great question. So coyotes definitely kill a lot of deer. Generally speaking, coyotes don't kill a lot of adult deer unless winter conditions are just right or just wrong if you're a deer. And usually that sort of just wrong condition for a deer is a crust that supports a coyote, but not a deer or at least not a running deer. So allows a coyote to chase down a deer. Under any other conditions, a coyote cannot dream of catching an adult deer. The biggest impact coyotes have on deer is that they kill a lot of newborn fawns. We don't actually consider it a population level impact because the reality is, and there's actually a fascinating research project that just wrapped up on this. So in Delaware, they don't have predators, period. There are literally like two coyotes in the entire state. The whole Delmarva Peninsula just doesn't have predators. And so they just did a fawn mortality study a couple of years ago and half of their fawns died. We see the exact same thing where there are predators. So deer produce a lot of fawns because a lot of them die, right? They're fairly helpless when they're young. They die of disease, accidents, all sorts of things. When you have a predator, the predator kills them, but you're gonna lose half your fawns one way or the other. So it's not a population level impact, but they do kill a lot of fawns. Where you wanna start? Chronic Wasting Disease. So for those of you who are not familiar with chronic wasting disease, it is a spongiform encephalopathy. It's basically mad cow disease for deer. It's caused by a prion, which is the scariest thing they ever, well I don't know who came up with it, but it's terrible. A prion is a misshapen, misfolded protein. It has no DNA, it's not alive, you can't kill it, right? And somehow it causes other proteins to also missform. So that's how it replicates itself. That's what causes all prion diseases, which is like mad cow is the obvious one people know about. There's one called Scrapey and Sheep. There's several of them. They are incurable, they are 100% fatal. There are human versions of prion diseases. It's called Crisfeldt-Yakub disease, people. It's 100% fatal. There's no treatment, there's no cure. There's no vaccine, there's no way to do anything about it. So chronic wasting disease is the deer version of that. It is slowly spreading around the country, primarily from people moving live deer, typically captive cervids farmed deer. It's a scary, unstoppable disease, you know? I hope we never get it, but at the same time I have a hard time, there's no evidence that anyone has been able to stop it as yet. The scary part of chronic wasting disease right now, to me, is that it is unstoppable. When it shows up in a place, there's nothing you can do about it. The reason it hasn't gotten enough press in my mind is because it's so slow acting, right? An animal can be infected with chronic wasting disease and may not show any symptoms for a year and a half. Meanwhile, they're spreading it to all their other deer friends and might live for two years. So, you know, the reality is by the time you detect CWD in your population, you've had it for a while. And every deer that gets it dies and it just takes a long time to have population level impacts. There are places in Wyoming that have had it for, I think, since the 70s. And research there suggests those populations are trending for extinction. And these are extremely low density deer populations, like one to three per square mile. And so it takes a long time to spread in those populations. Wisconsin has had it since, they've known about it since 2002. They probably had it in the mid 90s. In their core area, about 30% of the deer now have it, which is sort of the magic tipping point in productive habitat where that will now start causing declines. And this is where I think the press is gonna come in because when a state, a big deer state like Wisconsin suddenly starts having unstoppable declines in their deer herd, it's gonna generate a lot of press. People are finally gonna realize how serious it is. At that point, once you have it, there's nothing. So our response plan, should we ever detect it in Vermont, is to attempt to kill every deer within 10 miles for at least five years. You know, obviously testing every one of those as we go. But essentially try to eradicate it. Every other state that's sort of had that plan in place, politics usually gets in the way, right? When you say we're gonna eradicate deer in a 10 mile radius area, which is just like four or five towns. A, that's incredibly hard to do. But B, someone says, I don't think this is necessary. And then it gets held up and doesn't happen. And gets delayed and ends up going nowhere. Our plan is to do that. No idea if it would even work though. If it's already spread beyond there. The best chance we have is to keep it out. And so we don't allow people to bring deer in from any state that we know has CWD. Within the next couple of years, we're probably gonna ban bringing whole deer, or high-risk parts from any state, anywhere. Because the reason for that being, or an example of why we were gonna do that, Tennessee just detected CWD this year for the first time. You know, found it. Okay, well let's do some testing around there. I think they're up to 150 positives so far, which suggests they've probably had it for close to a decade and hadn't detected it yet. So our best bet is to just not let deer in from anywhere. Or at least high-risk parts, which is like the brain spinal cord. If someone wants to go there and hunt, bring your taxidermy and mount back. Bring meat back, that's fine. But don't bring a whole deer carcass that might bring chronic wasting disease back. So we have that ban. We've banned deer urine lures. Preons, the preons that cause chronic wasting disease are primarily spread in saliva, feces, and urine. Further, all deer urine lures are produced in captive-serviced facilities, deer farms. Also they don't work at all, but hunters believe they work. So the reality is what deer urine lures are is a bunch of deer in a pen on a grate urinating and defecating through the floor. That all gets filtered into a bottle and someone says, here, pure deer urine. It's snake oil. Yeah, it's snake oil for sure. But the point is urine is bad enough, but then you add the feces into it, then you're probably increasing the preon load in that. There's a very high risk of CWD preons being in deer urine. And captive facilities are far the highest risk of having chronic wasting disease. So we've banned urine lures. We work with the agency of agriculture on our handful of captive-serviced facilities in this state. We're lucky that we have very few. And we more or less don't allow new ones. We don't allow white-tailed deer in captivity at all. We don't allow any native species in captivity. But the few like elk and red-deer farms that exist, they're basically not allowed to import deer. And I don't think the agency of ag would allow new farms if they can stop it. If I have something to say about the continuity, did you say you bring a deer from Tennessee? Nothing. I think it's like 3,500 degrees. So like the surface of the sun. Bleach is generally what's recommended for disinfecting. It kills like 50%. It's not, it doesn't really work. So the other scary part of preons that I didn't mention, because they're not alive, they don't have DNA, they can actually bind to soil and remain infective in soil for at least 16 years. And we don't know beyond that, but 16 years was the end of that research study and they were still infective. So that's part of the once you have it, even in a captive facility, part of the problem is, what they do in captive facilities is, yeah, they call all their animals. Of course, they get paid for that. They get indemnity payments, which is ridiculous. But five years later, they're allowed to put new animals in there. Well, guess what, that's still in the soil, still in whatever other parts of that facility. And if it ever shows up in the wild, it's now in your soil. It's not gonna go away. It's so far a North American disease. So that did actually originate in captivity at a wildlife research facility in Colorado. But so far it's more or less limited to North America. It has shown up in South Korea, which was because of movement of live animals. And interestingly, Norway, I believe, just found it a couple of years ago. They now believe theirs was spontaneous. So when the human version of the prion disease happens, it's spontaneous, and it's not transmissible. Like if a human gets crusfeld yacob, they can't transmit it to anybody. So some genesis of it exists. So at some point, there's a variant crusfeld yacob, which is transmissible. Right, you have to eat brain to get, well, you have to eat something with prions in it to get Karuna and get it. Yeah, and so one of the things that's got a lot of press recently with CWD is there's an ongoing research study in Canada. And it has some flaws with the study, but the take-home message is still important. So they were studying macaque monkeys, and they managed to infect one with CWD simply by feeding it infected venison. So it suggests that CWD can cross the species barrier simply by something eating meat from an infected animal. There are major differences between macaques and humans and some of the barriers we have, but the point is that risk is there and is very real. Did they find one with the macaques? God, I thought it was transmissible within that population. Again, it's an ongoing study. My understanding is that they only had four animals in the study, so I think one got infected and probably isn't even allowed to contact the other ones, but I don't know. What would it take for deer to eat buckthorn? If they're hungry, deer actually eat buckthorn. They browse buckthorn pretty heavy on my property, and I have a lot more buckthorn than I want, but they're not gonna control it at all. And if they're eating buckthorn, you have a browse problem because they've eaten everything else. So not a good thing. Roundup works really well on buckthorn. So I read a book a number of years ago about mad cow disease and prions that I was first introduced to me. As I recall, scraping and mad cow and chronic wasting don't actually cross, do they? Or do they? No, no, for most of these diseases- No, they're all relying on prions. They all rely on prions, but for most of them there is a species barrier. So they're species specific. Scrapey is sheep and goats. Mad cow or bovine spongiform encephalopathy is bovids, cows. And chronic wasting disease is all members of the deer family. So everything from deer to moose, caribou, elk, but. I'm curious whether there's been any discussion or tracing of the idea of global warming and how that might affect the deer population. Yeah, so I mean, we definitely consider what, and our long range plans, we're definitely considering what climate change is gonna do, and obviously, winters are, certainly on average, going to be less severe, less impactful to deer. In the short term, probably more variable. So we'll have very mild winters, but we're also gonna have fairly hard winters interspersed there. Long term deer are going to benefit here from climate change. They are a winner, right, from climate change. Us fragmenting the landscape, combined with climate change, it all benefits deer. That'll affect the density, right? Well, we're just gonna have, just them not dying in the winter is gonna affect the density, yeah. And we're gonna have to essentially make up for that more and more with hunting. Can you explain how deer benefit from how that fragmentation? So deer are often called an edge species. So they do really well in a mix of forests and fields. The other piece of that is that hunting is greatly limited in a fragmented landscape, primarily because access to properties is limited. So they're not dying in the winter and hunters aren't able to kill them. They're gonna do really well. That's why deer in suburbia thrive because they are essentially, there are no predators that close to people, there are no human predators, and there's a lot of high quality food. Ticks, everyone blames deer for ticks. So, first, it's called a black-legged tick, not a deer tick. There is a relationship between deer density and the abundance of ticks on the landscape, but only at high deer densities. We basically do not see deer densities in Vermont that are high enough to influence tick abundance. More importantly, deer have no influence on things like Lyme disease or anaplasmosis or any of the diseases that ticks carry. Ticks are getting those from rodents. On the one hand, if we had 30 deer per square mile, we'd probably have more ticks than we do. On the other extreme end, the ticks are gonna be here, and if we don't have deer for them to feed on, and so deer are the primary host for adult black-legged ticks, but if we don't have deer for them to feed on, they're gonna feed on small mammals and rodents and other things, which are what infects them with Lyme disease and anaplasmosis. So you may not have quite as many ticks, probably still pretty close, but more of them are gonna be infected by the bacteria that we're all concerned about with ticks. If they didn't carry diseases, we wouldn't really care about ticks, right? We wouldn't really care because of the diseases. Yes. The last one during the main. Is there any indication that that... So winter ticks, different species of tick, for those of you that don't know. Yeah, they have a huge impact on moose in Vermont as well, but really just in Northeastern Vermont, where we have higher moose densities, they don't affect deer. And the reason is that, so I don't know how many of you have ever seen a winter tick, but they're really big and slow and easily groomed off. And deer are very effective groomers. Moose don't groom. They didn't evolve with parasites that they had to groom off. So they only groom when it really becomes a problem and really starts to itch, which is too late, which is why they're a problem for moose. But deer essentially just lick them off or groom them off some way. Right, right, they would get on deer, but really sort of the interesting thing with winter ticks is we only see high numbers of winter ticks where we have a lot of moose. Because otherwise, you get one on a coyote occasionally or one on a bear or maybe one survives on a deer and doesn't get groomed off. So they persist at very low numbers, but on moose they're able to thrive because there can be tens of thousands on a moose. And so their numbers explode in areas where we have a lot of moose. Yeah, sort of the fact that turkeys have on regeneration as far as mayfum and stuff goes. They love the seeds. They love the seeds. You know, there's a lot of debate and I honestly don't know if anyone's actually studied it. I could see where it may have some impact but I would have trouble believing that you're really gonna completely inhibit maple regeneration just because you have turkeys. They still, some seeds are gonna get buried somewhere and get in there. But they do eat a lot of seeds. Maple, ash, acorns too, you know? He does deer urine change. You're saying that an area that was deer urine once will sort of tail off and maybe a new one would say. So it totally, completely varies. Some, typically the bigger deer yards tend to be very traditional and they'll be used for decades. Use might shift around to the best areas within that but they'll be used for a long time. Smaller deer yards tend to come and go. They may, some of them may be only used for a few years while they're really good. Maybe they get browsed real heavy for those years. Maybe a couple trees blow over and that's enough to reduce the cover. It totally, it's all over the board. So it's the larger deer yards that you're concerned about now? Those are the ones we're primarily concerned about because those are really gonna support the bulk of your deer. There are, especially now as we have more easier winters, those smaller yards become more prevalent. We get a lot more deer that will spend most of their winter in a 50 acre deer yard. And I think those can come and go all the time. Just, you know, forest change. I think it kind of roughly would work on that scale of however long it takes for that cover to either break up or a new area to grow up. We did a survey two years ago now in Chelsea. We surveyed the whole town of Chelsea and we found that most of the, what we had mapped as deer yard was still deer yard but not great, but a lot of new areas had grown up. They just, they were too young when the mapping was first done and now they've matured enough and the highest quality deer yard was actually stuff we didn't even have mapped. So it challenges us to figure out a way. It's impossible for us to go and resurvey the whole state. They just, it's impractical. So it challenges us to find a new way to sort of identify those areas almost remotely so we can protect them even if we haven't been out there. Yeah, and that's what we're looking at is technology, essentially. When you did the survey back in the 80s, wasn't it? Started in, yeah, early 80s. Yeah. That was actually feed on the ground at the time. And the reason we can't do that now, aside from the fact that everything costs more to do now, is at the time, department employees basically just went where they wanted to go and just surveyed things. Now we spend, so the survey we did in Chelsea, we spent two thirds or the person who was leading the project spent two thirds of her time contacting landowners and getting permission to go on the properties and trying to get enough so you can plan a day survey route. It's just completely impractical to try to do that. So if we could just go wherever we wanted and survey the state and not worry about walking through people's backyards without their permission, we could probably maybe do it. Drones are gonna make a difference? I don't think drones are necessary. I mean, we have great aerial imagery as is. We have LiDAR data now, which is incredible. We can probably predict where deer yards are pretty accurately, you know, on the ground is still on the ground, but at the very least, we can predict enough to say, all right, we need to go look at this if it's up for an active 50 permit or something, we'll be like, all right, we gotta, it looks like it should be deer yard, let's go look at it, as opposed to just being, well, it's not mapped, so let it go. That's the hope. Wherever there are deer in what we call yarding conditions, so if there are probably, technically, I would say 18 inches, but realistically, if there are 15 inches of snow on the ground, solidly, if there are deer in an area, it's a deer yard. Yeah, bucks tend to kind of hang on the periphery of a deer yard, so sort of, you know, the fat cycle thing I showed you earlier was for female deer. Bucks, you know, gain a lot of fat and then they lose all of it in November because they're doing one thing. And then, which is where a winner like, like we had this year where it started in November, is kind of dangerous for mature bucks because they don't get a chance to gain any weight back before winter starts. So bucks go in a winter in poorer condition, but one of the benefit of bucks, you know, weighing 50% more than a doe, they're able to hang out on the periphery, they deal with deeper snow, and stay where there's higher quality food. And so, and actually, sort of a physiological thing with ruminants is the bigger you are, the better you can digest poorer quality food. That's why a moose can live on essentially wood in the winter, whereas a deer couldn't. But a buck can live on poorer quality brows and get more out of it than a smaller doe can. So they tend to stay on the periphery of yards, but they're all in the same area. Two quick things. It's amazing to me when you go into the edge of like a hemlock grove or that, and you can see deer beds that they don't melt the snow. They're so well insulated, as you pointed out earlier with the temperature thing. I mean, here's the little bed, but there's no melted snow. That's incredible. Yeah, and if you see- They don't waste their energy. Right, and if you ever manage to somehow see one before it sees you, that's bedded after a snow, it'll be covered in snow. The deer will have snow on its back that hasn't melted. Yeah, their hair coat is incredible. And one of the other things that helps them deal with cold temperatures is snow. So if we have nice, deep, fluffy snow, a deer can bed down in that. The snow is maybe 20 degrees, probably not much colder than that, whereas the air can be zero. Whereas if we don't have snow or they're on bare ground or ice, that's cold. And they're losing heat to that. So having deep, fluffy snow can actually help them deal with cold. The other thing is, you mentioned feeding deer is bad. Isn't there a lot of science that says that there are rumors, change in the fall, to digest this low quality material like hemlock, and that when you put grain and high quality hay into their rumors, it's like death. I mean, isn't it really bad for them? Yeah, so, and I'm glad you mentioned that because I forgot to mention that. So yeah, so the bacteria in their gut sort of evolve. They have different bacteria that digest different things. So as their diet changes, the bacteria in their gut change. And so if you suddenly introduce supplemental feed in the middle of winter, they can't digest it. And especially with things like corn and some grains, it can be fatal. They can get entrotoxemia and rumidacidosis, which can both be fatal. And are usually from suddenly being fed corn to which the deer are like, ooh, this is delicious, let me eat a lot of it. But the bacteria in their gut can't digest it at all. They also often find near feed sites deer that have starved to death, kind of like the pictures I showed with a full stomach. Because they can eat food, but they can't digest it. The two of them would come to our yard and then they stopped coming and then just the fawn came. So I said, oh well. And then later that year, up in the woods under a hemlock tree, I found the remains of her mother and it's amazing how efficient the process is. But there's a big wad, I guess, if something was in her gut. Rum and contents. So that's, yeah, it's needles and whatever they've been eating and stuff. But that's actually how we, when we do dead deer searches in the spring, because with predators, you find a bone here and a bone there and whatever. Find where she actually died is those stomach contents. Because predators don't move those. So that's actually. That's where all was left. Yeah. So as there's been determined, the coyotes had noticed these two deer every night go in the same general place. And the ambushed her. Yeah. I mean that was my thing. Is that a good theory? Yeah, I mean, they'll learn and that's actually another one of the problems with feed sites is predators can key in on feed sites really easily. You put all the deers food in one place and then you put all the predators food in one place. Yeah, it makes it easy. To maintain a large deer yard, don't you have to do some logging? It can't remain the same forever. Yeah, we absolutely, you know, I would never tell anyone, don't ever, don't touch it. Logging is fine, but the key is you wanna promote that cover, that canopy as much as possible. But there's nothing wrong with logging in a deer yard or adjacent to a deer yard, you know. It's all good. Because yeah, if you don't touch it, eventually it'll grow old and fall down. So they're in the yard and they're not really eating anything you mentioned for weeks sometimes. Do they have to get water or do they eat snow? They are actually able to get, just about all the water they need from browse, which is one of the other beauties of browse. Well, they rarely go along without eating anything. They can eat snow too, but they can basically, they're really efficient at their water use much more so than we are. So they're able to get most of their water from browse. Another problem with feed sites, there's no water in supplemental food or corn. So they have to have water if they're eating that food. Okay, no more questions? Great, thanks everyone.