I thought I would let everyone know that I have been in the demanding work of hunting down a wildlife PhD somewhere in the Southeast.  Not naming any names or universities, I have received 2 offers already and am interviewing for a third on Thursday.  It’s an exciting time right now for Kara and myself, but there is going to be home state switch coming up in January one way or another.  In the meantime, I’m counting down weeks (13 currently) until my oral exam/thesis defense in late October…so needless to say, this fall is going to be wild and woolly!  Something tells me that I’ll still find some time to carve out for the great outdoors though.  I should know what doctoral position I’ll be stepping into by next week, so I’ll be sure to share that with everyone when the deal is done.

Well, here goes Strategy #2 as put forth by the North Carolina Environmental Defense.

Reestablish natural landscapes through active restoration and natural regeneration.  Repair past ecological degradation so that natural systems can support future ecological and human needs.

Human society is usually a consistent precursor to environmental degradation and eradication of certain species.  North America was no different.  We settled the United States and almost eradicated the American buffalo, elk, pronghorn, and wild turkeys.  Extinction ran its full course with the Passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeets.  Through conservation efforts, most game species have been restored to record levels thanks to the efforts of hunters, state/federal agencies, and concerned non-profits.

Natural landscapes are in the same predicament.  I’ll lay out several of the target restorations as laid out by the Environmental Defense to ensure a North Carolina that is just as beautiful 100 years down the road as it is today.

*Restore commercial and recreational fisheries – River herring, striped bass, Atlantic sturgeon, oysters, and more have been decimated by overharvesting.  These species and fisheries need to be restored to historical levels.  Strategies for conservation might include destroying some man-made water flow and dam structures in our rivers.

*Wetlands need to be protected.  Over half of North Carolina’s 11 million acres of wetlands have been damaged or destroyed.  Wetlands are sanctuaries for game species, non-game species, and biodiversity.  Also, wetlands are an ecosystem service in water quality and erosion control.

*Restoring native food webs.  This includes the successful reintroduction of top predators – red wolves…maybe even mountain lions.  These would play an important role in restoring natural balance and reducing already over-abundant game populations – namely deer.

*Restoring natural fire regimes will enable longleaf pine ecosystems to continue their rebound and increase in acreage.  Longleaf forests are a tremendously unique ecosystem that harbors high diversity of many organisms.

*Restoring a native landscape also involves the eradication and killing of other non-native organisms.  The removal of kudzu, japanese honeysuckle, stiltgrass, Asian clams, nutria, Dutch elm disease, West Nile virus, and flathead catfish would greatly benefit the native habitats of North Carolina and restore proper ecosystem function and balance.

There were more bullets laid out under this strategy, but I tried to bounce from high point to high point.  You may or more may not agree with all of them, but I think that stepping back and looking at the big picture is appropriate and gives perspective.  Definitely food for thought.

If you enjoyed this blog post, check out Strategy #1.  Strategy’s #3 and #4 still to come.

I had not posted on the Camo Coalition out of North Carolina, but the Hog Blog did.  A great and innovative program out my own state.  It’s also that time of year, when I like to start checking the Hog Blog for their hog hunting and blacktail deer hunting trips in California.  These guys put in on the line every fall, and The Outdoor Smorgasbord wishes them the best of luck this year as well. 

In a publication produced by the North Carolina Environmental Defense, conservation biology experts laid out steps that they thought were necessary for North Carolina to arrive at year 2100 in great ecological shape.  In the publication, they laid out 4 strategies that the Environmental Defense thought were necessary for North Carolina’s beautiful ecosystems to not only persist, but thrive almost a century into the future.

Strategy #1 – Establish a network of optimally located, sufficiently large, well-connected nature preserves, including both lands and maritime preserves, managed explicitly to maintain ecosystem processes and biodiversity.

In order for North Carolina’s – and the rest of North America’s for that matter - ecosystems to thrive into the future,  large, core reserves in the mountains, Piedmont, coastal plan, and tidal zone need to be designated and protected.  In large protected areas, natural fire regimes can be be allowed without significant disturbance to human development, complex predator/prey relationships can be restored, and true wilderness experiences can stretch into future generations. 

Incorporated into the large, contiguous preserves, travel corridors are also an important component.  Travel corridors allow for migration between seasonal habitats for organisms, avenues for genetic exchange and diversity, and provide connectivity for source/sink dynamics.  The publication makes an ironic comment that human travel mechanisms (railroads, highways) are the very thing that contributes most to fragmentation and obstacles to easy animal movement.  Existing corridors need to be protected and future development placed with them in mind. 

Reserves need to be as large as possible for several reasons: species are less likely to go extinct or become threatened in larger areas, larger reserves obviously include more species, enable greater genetic variety, are more resilient to catastrophic events such as natural disasters, provide a refuge to external disturbance, and large charismatic species like black bears and elk are more likely to thrive in the largest areas in a landscape. 

 The publication gets into the specifics of how these strategies can be carried out, but I will spare you the details.  3 more strategies to come…

Well, I talked to my buddy and they completed their collection of the remaining 33 deer over only 2 nights.  Needless to say, sleep wasn’t too abundant (about an hour both nights), but the job is done until the secondary collection in late winter.  I will be sure to update you all on his findings when the data is analyzed and sifted through.  For sure, there will be some interesting findings for those of us who live in the Southeast and hunt in areas dominated by pines. 

One of the other procedures that we did for the white-tailed deer collection this week was examine kidney condition and fat surrounding the kidney.  This method has been used for several decades as an index of overall deer health.  Not suprisingly, the more fat the healthier the deer.  Most rating scales are poor, fair, good, excellent.

After the kidney is removed and weighed, the fat is removed using a scalpel and reweighed.  The difference is obviously the amount of fat on the kidney and long term trends can be useful in identifying the health of a deer herd as management and land use changes.

Here is the kidney after the fat has been removed.  You can read more about this technique at the following website.  Scroll down and you will find what you are looking for.

On Tuesday, I traveled down with a group of graduate students from the NCSU wildlife department and veterinary school to collect deer for a buddy’s project.  He was authorized to cull 36 white-tail does in order to examine their health during the summer months.  He is planning a second collection for next February or March for a comparison study.

After getting our processing station set up, we headed out to shoot our first deer and get started with the project.

It took a while in the 100 degree weather to find a deer close and still enough to shoot, but we finally got it done.  That’s when the work started.  We rushed to the deer and made an incision behind the front leg to insert a syringe and draw 5 vials of blood that would be used later for blood/serum analysis.  The heart would beat for 3 to 5 minutes post-mortem and it was really something to see.

At this point, some of the pictures I’ll be posting are a little graphic, so if you wish to continue reading, you know what to do. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 13th, 14th, North Carolina State University, University of Tennessee, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, Quality Deer Management Association, Western Carolina Quality Deer Management Program, and NCSU Forestry and Environmental Outreach Program are sponsoring a deer workshop in Spruce Pine, NC.

The workshop is open to deer hunters, foresters, biologists, land managers, and anyone else who is interested in deer management.  Keynote speakers are Craig Harper – authority on food plots, old field vegetation, and timberland management for better deer habitat; Brad Howard – NCWRC biologist in the mountain region; Chris Moorman; Jim Phillips; Bennie Riddle; and myself – Gabe Karns.  We’ll be addressing topics from food plot management to deer diseases to habitat management to mature buck habits on a QDM-managed property.  I’ll be speaking to the latter using GPS collar data that I have collected over the past 2 seasons.

On day 2, there will be a half-day field session on food plots, habitat management, and herd assessment.

If you are interested, visit the deer workshop website. It is not too late to register and I can assure that you will learn alot about white-tailed deer and how to manage your property.
I hope to see you all there.

Working through a collaborative between Realtree.com and NC State, my first article for the Realtree website was posted this weekend. Part of my thesis research is examining brain abscesses among white-tailed deer, especially between my Maryland study site and Texas (I used the King Ranch as my TX study site).

Unfortunately, the pictures that accompanied the article did not carry over into the website format, but we are currently working on fixing that. Regardless, it was nice to see some visible fruit from my labor and get the ball rolling on this nice side project to my graduate research. Future articles will be discussing lunchtime strategies during the pre-rut, “South Texas Rodeo”, and early-season hunting strategies.

Let me know what you think about the article and by all means, email me and let me know if you have seen, or see, this condition in your deer herd in the future.

Photo courtesy of xoospot.com

Gray wolves in the greater Yellowstone area of the northern Rocky Mountains, which would have been fair game for hunters in three states as a result of a federal government decision in March, were again put under the protections of the Endangered Species Act by a judge in Montana on Friday.

The action by the judge, Donald W. Molloy of Federal District Court, took the form of a preliminary injunction and could be reversed. But Judge Molloy’s language showed serious reservations about the Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to remove endangered species protections for the wolves.

Environmental groups, including Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club, which sued the Interior Department and the Fish and Wildlife Service on behalf of the wolves, persuaded Judge Molloy that there was a possibility of irreparable harm to the species if hunts had been allowed.

The states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming; the National Rifle Association; and a variety of hunting and cattlemen’s associations intervened on the federal government’s behalf.

The judge said the decision by the Fish and Wildlife Service last year to approve Wyoming’s plans for maintaining just eight breeding pairs instead of the 15 the federal government once required was “problematic.” He added that the decision, which ran counter to the federal government’s earlier rejection of the Wyoming plan, “represents an agency change of course unsupported by adequate reasoning.”

Doug Honnold, the lawyer for Earthjustice, said in an e-mail message: “This is great news for wolves. All three states had plans to allow hunts this fall, 500 wolves were scheduled to be killed.” Spokesmen for the Interior Department could not be immediately reached for comment.

Eric Keszler, spokesman for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department said, “Obviously we are disappointed in the decision,” which he said had not yet been fully reviewed. “We’re confident that Wyoming’s wolf management plan is adequate to maintaining a recovered wolf population in the state.”

The fate of wolves has been the subject of bitter litigation since they were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995.

Authored by Felicity Barringer of the NY Times, news broke this morning that Judge Molloy reversed the recent declassification of gray wolves by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  This not only means that hunters will not be able to harvest a sustainable number of wolves this upcoming fall, but more importantly, gray wolves will continue to increase population levels and pose an even greater threat to cut deeper into pockets of western big game herds, especially elk and moose, that live in close proximity to established wolf packs.

I do not post this article as an innocent bystander who is viewing a situation 2,000 miles across the country…  In 2003, I hiked the Bitteroot Mountain Range in western Montana during a 6 day archery elk hunt.  Unbelievably, we saw nearly as many elk killed and left to rot as we did living during the first few days of our hunt.  A pack of wolves had come through the area and on several occasions we could even see where wolf and prey tracks gouged deeply into the high-country roads just hours before we came through. 

Now, I do not think that the situation is as dire and widespread as some radical ‘wolves are worse than Satan’ groups would lead us to believe, but I also think that at 2,000 animals – the species has reached an acceptable level in the West that would now allow hunters to keep wolf numbers at a sustainable level…in turn allowing hammered pockets of elk and moose to rebound. 

It will be interesting to see how Judge Molloy makes his final ruling, but one thing is certain…you better not show up in elk camp this fall with a wolf hide stretched out across your saddlebags.