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Prairie State Deer BY GARY THOMAS Each year, the Department of Natural Resources handles thousands of calls from nonresidents asking for information on how to participate in the state's annual deer hunt. The reason? Illinois has a high-quality herd, considered to be the best by many knowledgeable hunters.
But let's flash back to the 1950s. Who would have thought then that deer hunting in the Prairie State would rival and then surpass hunting in the northern and mountain states?
"I did," said Jack Calhoun. "Not in the beginning, but after we began to see how the deer were adapting to Illinois habitat and how they fed on corn and beans, I was pretty certain that Illinois hunters were going to have some prize whitetails."
Calhoun was the wildlife biologist hired in the 1950s to expand the Illinois deer herd and bring big game hunting back to the Prairie State. But keep in mind that when Calhoun started work, wildlife biologists believed deer needed large, unmanaged, mature stands of timber to prosper.
"That's what was being taught in wildlife management classes at universities throughout the country," Calhoun said. "In Illinois, there were very few areas that would fall into that category, so initially we thought we would be able to establish nice populations of deer in southern Illinois and in some parts of western and northwestern Illinois, plus along some of our rivers.
"Once we started releasing deer outside the Shawnee National Forest, we realized the white-tailed deer was a highly versatile animal that would adapt readily to smaller timbers. They didn't need large tracts of forest, and they didn't mind living alongside corn and bean fields. In fact, we learned they would prosper there. We realized that deer would do just fine in
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sparsely timbered counties loaded with corn and bean fields. Rather than browse, the deer fed on corn and beans, and resorted to browsing during the winter months when there weren't crops in the fields."
Calhoun, now in his early 80s, might be considered the godfather of Illinois' deer herd. He grew up in Putnam County and received his degree in wildlife management from Oregon State University, then considered the finest fish and game school in the country.
World War II sidetracked the wildlife biologist. He flew four-engine bombers in the Pacific during the war, then returned home and went to work for the Illinois Natural History Survey, heading up the pheasant project. He transferred to the Department of Conservation to head up the pheasant and quail project in 1951, but left for private enterprise shortly thereafter.
Calhoun received a telephone call asking him to return to work for the Conservation Department in 1954, to head up the deer program.
"They said they wanted a deer hunting season," Calhoun said. "My job was to make sure there were enough deer to have one."
Let's flash back again, this time to the late 1700s, when Europeans began settling the state. They had an abundance of deer, as well as bears, elk and other large game. But these early settlers exploited the resource—clearing timbered areas and using the deer and other game for food and clothing.
By the mid-1850s, most of the bears and elk were gone, and the white-tailed deer had declined to the point where 15 counties in the northeast and north-central part of the state made deer hunting illegal for half of each year. Things didn't get better. In 1901, the state legislature declared a "temporary" closed season for deer until the population could rebound. That temporary closure would last for more than half a century.
Illinois began the process of rebuilding the deer herd in the 1930s, when deer from a game farm were stocked in Carroll County. About the same time, southern Illinoisans were starting to see deer that probably crossed the river from either Kentucky or Missouri. In 1935, some deer were obtained from Michigan and released into Pope County.
These stockings were not considered great successes, but neither were they failures. Small herds of whitetails were established in areas where they were released, but they weren't spreading out to other parts of the state.
When Calhoun took over the program, there were small herds of deer scattered about the state. The only real concentrations were on the goose refuge areas, in the Shawnee National Forest and along the Rock River in Ogle and Winnebago counties. There were very few deer in central Illinois, except along the rivers.
"My job was really two-fold when I took over the deer program," Calhoun remembers. "I was to build the deer herd to a point where we could have a hunting season, but just as important, our waterfowl biologists wanted me to get some of the deer off of our goose refuges in southern Illinois. We had large herds of deer there, and they were eating all the feed that was meant for the geese."
That's where Calhoun began his trap and transport program.
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"We built large box traps with openings on both ends, and put them at the Horseshoe Lake and Union County refuges. They worked like big rabbit traps. We would bait them, and when the deer went in for the food, they would trip a release and the gates would slam shut."
The deer that were trapped initially were moved to parts of the Shawnee National Forest that didn't have good numbers of deer. Calhoun made two discoveries during that first year of trapping.
"When we began trapping on Horseshoe, we captured a few deer that had been trapped prior to World War II," he said. "Some of these animals were so old they hardly had any teeth left. That told us that deer could live long lives if they were protected and if no natural predators were around.
"We also learned that we couldn't move mature bucks. We didn't have many problems transporting does or young bucks, but as a general rule the older bucks would panic and die of a heart attack. After a while, we just started letting them go when we trapped one. We learned as we went." After a deer was trapped, it would be moved into a transfer box and driven by truck to the designated release area.
"We had a devil of a time getting the deer from the trap into the transport box," Calhoun remembers. "Finally we came up with the idea of putting a net over the entrance and opening the gate. The deer would run out of the box into the net and we could then move it in the net into the transport boxes. On short trips we just left them in the net and moved them that way. We found out that was easier and less stressful on the deer. We spent a lot of time nursing bruises and cuts from kicking deer back then."
Eventually, the biologists fashioned 100-foot-long nets into deer corrals and were able to trap numerous deer by that method.
In 1957, it was time for the first modern-day deer season. Thirty-three counties were open to firearm hunting, and 1,735 deer were killed during the 3-day season. There was also a 15-day archery hunt, and 220 deer were taken by that method.
Calhoun made two decisions in 1957 that would have far-reaching impacts on the Illinois deer herd.
The first decision was based on what to shoot. He recommended that Illinois adopt an either-sex season, allowing hunters to harvest does or bucks.
"This was quite controversial at the time," Calhoun said. "Some of our neighboring states had bucks-
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only seasons, and people thought if we allowed the taking of does, we could decimate the population. But once we realized how adaptive deer were, we didn't believe taking does would slow the growth of the herd. In fact, we predicted that eventually it would take more than one deer per hunter to keep the population in check. We took a lot of criticism in those early years, but eventually we were proved to be right."
The second decision was to manage the herd county by county, rather than by region, because a number of counties didn't have strong enough populations to be open for hunting yet.
"Other states took more regional approaches to managing their deer," Calhoun said. "But we had areas with small populations alongside areas with nice populations of deer. We needed to know how many deer could be removed from a county without reducing the population to a point where it couldn't produce a surplus. We chose a method that counts the number of hunters and number of deer and uses those factors to obtain a trend. By having county check stations, we obtained data on doe/fawn ratios and the sex and age ratios of deer being harvested. That allowed us to predict hunter success in future seasons."
Biologists could raise or lower the number of hunting permits in a county based on whether it was being under-harvested or over-harvested. It allowed biologists to keep harvests in check, and shift hunting pressure to take advantage of local populations of deer. Other states took more regional approaches to management, and now probably wish they had Illinois' flexibility. "We also had to take into account Illinois' human population and the amount of available hunting ground," Calhoun said. "We had to recognize that some large counties didn't have as much hunting habitat as some of the smaller counties. We also had to consider areas like Cook County where there is an adequate deer population, but so many people living there that it would be difficult to hold a hunting season in a safe manner."
Illinois reached another milestone about 1963.
"We were nowhere close to having adequate deer populations in each county yet, but we had the opportunity to trade some of our deer to West Virginia for wild turkeys," Calhoun recalls. "The deer herd was progressing nicely, and we thought we could turn our attention to another species of wildlife we wanted to bring back to Illinois."
There are still states with lots
19 December 2000 more deer than you'll find in Illinois. In fact, some southern states allow hunters to take a deer a day during their hunting season. So what makes the Illinois deer herd stand out above the others? Quality.
Illinois is a rich, agricultural state, and wildlife is a product of the land. If you have rich soil, you tend to have quality wildlife. White-tailed deer not only took to the corn and beans they found here, they thrived on them.
"We knew we had something special early on," Calhoun said. "We had a doe weighing 200 pounds come off Long Island, a fawn weighing more than 170 pounds near the Illinois River and then a roadkill buck in Carroll County that weighed 390 pounds. In the early 1970s, a hunter in Carroll County killed a deer that weighed more than 400 pounds.
"We were kind of flying by the seat of our pants when we started," Calhoun said. "We made a lot of mistakes before we finally got it to where we wanted it—before we got it right." There has always been pressure to make major changes in the program, but the "proof is in the pudding." A check of the record book shows that nearly 25 percent of the entries in the latest edition of the Boone and Crockett record book came from the Prairie State.
The future looks bright, too. Illinois is every bit as innovative and as much a leader in white-tailed deer management as when the state's herd was being established. Using computerized programs and other high-tech management tools, Illinois is very much in control of the biological part of managing the herd. There is no reason to believe Illinois won't continue as the premier deer hunting state for years to come.
However, with the special seasons, different permits, hunters who specialize in different techniques and hunters who are far more demanding, deer management is a lot more complex today. Management includes collecting a great deal of information on hunters, landowner attitudes and other social information, making deer management as challenging today as it was a half-century ago.
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