#Deers project office update

This fall volunteers were out pulling memory cards and moving trail cameras to winter range in our study areas. The cameras will be moved twice annually to cover both summer and winter range. This spring 40 volunteers were trained up and put out 155 trail cameras across our three study summer areas which encompasses ~40,000 km 2. Our volunteers have been amazing spending thousands of hours chipping in where they can. Volunteer opportunities to date have included baiting deer traps, fixing deer traps, deer capture and collaring deer, mortality investigations, and trail camera placement across our three study areas. Our team continues to grow as we add funding partners, collaborators, and a growing list of dedicated volunteers. Our longest migrant this year was in the Okanagan, a doe which was collared near Apex Mountain (west of Penticton) last January, and May 1 decided to head for summer range, arriving west of Aspen Grove on May 12 th, covering 102 kms in a straight line.īy mid-October this year, nearly all the collared deer in each study area were back in their winter range. West Okanagan Study Area Cache Creek Study Area Boundary Study Area These maps included migrations of two randomly selected deer in each study area (black line). Here is a map of the summer and winter ranges in each of our three areas. Over time we hope to gather evidence which will help us advocate to maintain and restore migratory routes, and critical habitat. GPS collared deer help us understand how, when and why our deer move across the landscape. The breakdown of mortality sources in our study areas are as follows:Ĭougar 15, Canid 1, Coyote 1, Drowning 1, Apparent Grizzly Bear 1, Unknown 1, Vehicle 2īlack Bear 1, Cougar 2, Coyote 1, Unregulated harvest 2, Health 1Ĭougar 5, Apparent cougar 3, Coyote 1, Predation 1, Starvation 2, Unknown 1, Vehicle 2 We will have a better idea of fawn survival by spring of 2020. Survival of adult does after the first year of the project was 69% in the Boundary, 95% in Cache Creek, and 83% in the West Okanagan. Generally speaking, our deer in the Boundary have very low survival rates, whereas Cache Creek have high survival rates, and the West Okanagan is somewhere in between. The bad news is, in some of our areas our does seem to have low survival rates.Īs of October 2019, we have the following does and yearlings (fawns from spring of 2019) collared in our study areas: The good news is our deer are pregnant and have high twinning rates that means that it is unlikely our buck hunting seasons are having a negative effect on our mule deer population trajectory. While this technique has seen varied success in North America, it worked very well for our team.Īdult females (does) and juveniles (fawns) are what drive mule deer populations. This allowed our team to go in and capture and collar neonates (newborns) to identify survival rates right after fawns are born. This spring, our research team shortened the time between GPS location updates and was able to identify when our pregnant does were clustering (going into labour). These metrics are both considered very good for mule deer. As of spring 2019, our team had documented pregnancy rates of 93% and twinning rates of >69%. One of the first large purchases was two ultrasounds which would allow us to assess pregnancy and twinning rates as well as body condition. One of the questions we wanted to look at early on was the effect of hunting seasons on populations in the study areas.

#Deers project office update

The following is a brief update of what we’ve done, what we’re doing and how you can get involved. This spring saw the deployment of 155 trail cameras across our study areas, and a number of neonate (newborn mule deer) collared shortly after birth. The Southern Interior Mule Deer project continues to march along, adding additional components to the project and techniques.