SEBEC – State biologist Gerry Lavigne walked out of the woods and into waist-high snowdrifts. The scientist paused on his snowshoes to describe how 3-foot-deep snow makes movement impossible for deer. He stopped again to point out how a clear-cut by a private landowner had created this corridor of white, dividing the forest where the whitetails struggle to survive each winter.

“It’s unfortunate,” Lavigne said with disgust. “The hemlocks were cut for that housing lot. It’s just 100 yards. But now the rest is unavailable to the deer. There are the same number of deer in this area, but there is less acreage providing protection. Potentially, they could overutilize the food in what remains.”

The landowner could have cut nearly the same amount of timber and preserved the deer yard with selective cutting, he said.

Deer wintering areas, or deer yards, ranging anywhere from 50 to 12,000 acres, are where the white-tailed deer have created a system of trails within softwood cover, where they will remain for weeks at a time during cold and snowy weather, protecting themselves from starvation and predators.

Since 1986 the deer herd has grown from a population of 200,000 to more than 300,000, in part because of the establishment of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s deer permit system, which closely manages the deer hunt in specific areas.

But where the deer herd has proliferated is in southern Maine, where there is a warmer climate and less large-scale timber harvesting.

North of Bangor, it’s a different story. The number of deer killed in the northern two-thirds of the state has dropped from 19,000 to 15,000 since the early ’80s. In contrast, the number of deer taken in Maine’s southern third increased from 13,000 to 21,500 during that time.

The chief cause of the herd’s decline up north, said DIF&W Wildlife Management Supervisor Gene Dumont, was the spruce budworm epidemic of the 1970s that devastated softwood stands and led to timber companies salvaging woodlots by making vast clear-cuts. Eighty percent of deer wintering area was destroyed. Now DIF&W biologists are seeking to preserve the yards that remain and to create new ones.

Dumont said zoning under the Land Use Regulation Commission hasn’t helped.

Under LURC, which serves as the planning board for the state’s 10.5 million acres of unorganized territory, deer yards are protected, but may not exceed 3.5 percent of the land base.

Dumont said deer yards in actuality could encompass as much as 10 percent to 15 percent of an area. He also said the process involved in zoning deer yards through LURC is labor-intensive for DIF&W biologists, involving an extensive process of checks and balances. Lavigne said the process only fosters mistrust with landowners.

Forest management agreements

Six years ago, the DIF&W began working with large landowners, who own most of the unorganized territory, to establish forest management agreements to help preserve deer yards. This project became more of a priority two years ago after an advisory group set goals for the DIF&W in how it wanted the deer herd managed.

The group said there needed to be more whitetails in northern and eastern Maine to provide greater hunting and wildlife viewing opportunities. In order to bring the whitetails back to those areas, the group concluded, the department needed to increase the amount of wintering habitat to 8 percent.

Fred Todd, LURC’s manager of planning and administration, said 1.8 percent of the land in LURC’s jurisdiction is now protected for deer.

He said securing forestry agreements with industrial landowners has become the best way to bring the deer herd back to northern Maine.

Predators are not the main issue affecting deer survival.

“Sure, a large number of people argue that more efforts to control coyotes would help deer. But you can’t do it without the wintering shelter,” Dumont said. “You have coyotes in southern Maine but because there is much better wintering shelter, coyote mortality is a minor influence.”

DIF&W recently signed its eighth agreement, bringing the amount of protected land used by deer in the winter to 84,000 acres. The recent agreement with Hancock Timber Resource Group in Somerset County allows the Boston-based company to harvest 6,600 acres of its forestland while maintaining a minimum of 50 percent coniferous tree cover for deer. The areas that have been carefully selected for timber harvesting will also benefit the deer by providing food.

Deer feed on twigs from black fir, hemlock, balsam fir, spruce (if necessary) and cedar, the latter being a favored food source. Felled trees offer a one-time feast. But Lavigne said preserving cedar trees amounts to a great kindness to the animal.

“If I were a forester, I would make sure not to cut the cedar, knowing they like it,” he said. “If you leave it, it will provide droppings for years to come. If you give them the whole tree in one day, that’s too shortsighted.”

Deer survival in winter depends on their mobility, so they can get to food. In deer yards, evergreen canopies minimize snow depth, allowing deer to move easily under the cover, while nearby open areas provide forage from felled trees.

Dumont said that in the long run, the cooperative agreements benefit the industrial forest landowners as well as the deer.

“It gives the landowner predictability for managing their property over a long period of time,” Dumont said. “Under LURC, it’s cumbersome. If the cooperative agreements work, we can drop the deer yard from zoning, remove that process they’d have to go through.”

Understanding deer yards

Developing an understanding of deer yards can be difficult, especially because the entire extent of a deer yard can go undetected.

The yard Lavigne visits each week in Sebec looks like nothing more than a wooded area. But during a mile-long trek into the yard he pointed to evidence of deer: frozen cavities where they bed, twigs that have been stripped bare, and narrow paths that look no different from hiking trails.

“They are hiking trails,” Lavigne said with a grin.

At the Seboeis Stream deer yard in Howland, seniors at Penobscot Valley High School help the DIF&W by going out each week to gather data biologists use to measure the severity of the winter on deer.

Seniors at the school have done this for 10 years, ever since science teacher Nancy Burgoyne asked a local DIF&W biologist for ways the students could get involved in an environmental project.

The students said they enjoy getting out in the woods, but they had little understanding of what a deer yard is.

“I imagined there would be a huge field,” said Bianca Colbath during a meeting of the group in a PVHS classroom. “I had a whole idea concocted for what it was like out there. But it’s just a snowmobile trail.”

Several students said if they were in another deer yard, they wouldn’t be able to identify it as such. The thrill for them, they said, comes in looking for signs of life they can recognize.

“We’re still waiting to see the first deer,” said Noah McPike.

The DIF&W has been gathering data at deer yards around the state for 29 years. The purpose is to monitor the impact of winter severity on the deer, to determine how easily deer can move in winter conditions. If they are having difficulty, then starvation will play a greater role.

Two weeks ago the snow depth at the Howland yard was 26 inches in the open and 16 inches under the cover of the trees. Last week, it was 30 inches in the open and 19 inches in the cover.

Lavigne said if the snow is 10 to 12 inches deep, deer will start to move to the shelter of their wintering area; when it is as much as 18 inches deep, they will stay there most of the time; and when it is deeper than 24 inches, they are restricted to it.

Winter’s impact

So far, Maine has seen eight mild weeks followed by four relatively severe weeks, according to DIF&W’s winter severity index. Lavigne said if a late spring occurs, it could prove an unusually severe winter, which is not good for the deer.

In March, deer’s metabolism speeds up, causing the animal to require more food for energy. Low temperatures and wind create a further demand for food. In fact, any event that forces the animal to expend energy during a late winter can cause malnutrition and mortality when food is scarce.

Lavigne tells the story of a deer he watched fording a stream to escape hounds late in the winter. The deer bedded down safely across the river from the dogs, but Lavigne still found it dead the next morning. He said the stress of the chase caused the deer to deplete its energy supplies.

The DIF&W study of winter severity conditions on deer shows that on average moderate winters have predominated the past 20 years, while the 1970s produced mostly severe winters. Were the harsh winters of the ’70s to return, the deer population would decline.

Last year’s mild winter led to a healthy deer herd, allowing hunters in Maine last fall to kill a record 21,422 antlered bucks and register more deer than they have since 1980, bagging a total of 36,885.

DIF&W biologists recently recommended increasing the number of deer permits to stabilize or decrease the deer population in parts of the state. However, this number could change if the snow persists through March and April.

If that happens, the Maine deer herd could experience the first severe winter since 1987, causing the population to drop, particularly in northern Maine.

Then biologists would decide to issue fewer permits, while hunters and wildlife watchers would find fewer deer north of Bangor.

Deirdre Fleming covers outdoor sports and recreation for the NEWS. She can be reached at 990-8250 or at dfleming@bangordailynews.net.