Okay, let’s rephrase: the land that now makes up my quasi-suburban neighborhood in Austin, Texas was NOT always a paradise for deer. 500 years ago, there were hungry pumas around to kill and eat them. There were long summer droughts when the grass died off and there wasn’t any water to drink. Periodically, the deer would HAVE to migrate in search of food and water that they MIGHT not find.
Today, the pumas are gone, and there are ALWAYS well-watered grass, flowers and bushes for them to eat. Sounds like a good deal for Bambi, eh?
I live in a rural area, and the old time farmers have told me that in the 50’s, if somebody saw a deer in the area, it was talked about for a month, down at the feed mill. The locals used to go up to the UP to hunt deer. Now they are everywhere. We have one I call Fred, living in the front yard. He’s there almost every morning, walking around. He likes our bird feeder !!
I’ve got another one that I have to yell at, she comes up to the compost pile, looking for treats. She doesn’t run from the dogs, just walks away, so my dogs don’t bother chasing her. Her and the goats sometimes get into contests over the compost goodies.
Right. White-tailed deer are not animals of the forest primeval. They prefer second growth forest interspersed with clearings and edges where their food plants grow. Suburbia provides a perfect habitat for them, especially since we generously plant some of their favorite food plants for them in our gardens and yards.
No, I wasn’t joking about the insurance records. I was, however, paying insufficient attention to the historic eras involved. Oops.
Still, one can use such data from, say, a couple of centuries ago (or whenever it first became available) to provide for a longer baseline to extrapolate from.
Short version
Wolves drive the deer away from the open river valley
Trees are able to grow
Beaver move in where there are trees and water
Other species move into the beaver ponds and forest
Trees stabelize the river banks
Rats are not so bad … these suckers destroy the forests by eating up the young understory trees and herbaceous plants making an impoverished ecosystem.
In the 15th century prior to European contact, North America was probably marginally more forested than today, perhaps even a little less so. Indians maintained a patchwork of forests among their extremely intensive extensive specifically to maximise prey populations.
The forested North America of the 18th and 19th centuries was a product of Indian depopulation. It had almost all grown in the previous couple of decades. It wasn’t the state prior to European contact.
It’s also worth noting that we have also provided far more water for deer over much of the country. Most deer species need to drink at least daily, and will only travel a few kilometres to water, so the natural populations were only ever found close to water. Because deer will happily drink out of troughs and dams provided by cattle, they are able to occupy a lot of drier country that at one time would have been out of reach, and the populations in those areas are consequently infinitely higher.
On forests, with the passage of the homestead act many tree farms were planted all over the great plains states in areas that previously you could go miles without ever seeing a tree.
So many trees were cut down while many others were planted. In my area back in the 40’s they would totally clear cut an area then go in and build houses. Homeowners then planted trees and after 50 years those trees are huge and it often feel like a forest as you drive down a tree covered street. In fact if you go on top of the highest building in our area, about 15 stories, and look out all you see are trees. They can be a pain when we have ice storms and all the branches break off.
Back to the OP, I wouldnt be surprised since years ago there were huge, roaming packs of wolves and these were smart and knew how to surround and kill whole herds of deer. Deer were also hunted down by the Indians.
The question for me was never about whether or not it’s reasonable to believe that deer populations are greater now and certainly not about if they’re greater now than recent history or why it is that deer populations are up.
All good answers, though.
My question was really about if it’s possible to come up with any sort of hard numbers for deer populations in 1492.
I think the problem is too many variables and not enough measurement.
I would suspect that the number one predator of 15th century deer were humans, and that the answer to the question would lie more in the direction of what Blake was talking about in terms of estimating Native American deer usage.
Europeans came here and saw “virgin wilderness” and so that’s the picture we grow up with, but that wilderness wasn’t as virgin as we’d like to believe and was really pretty much intensively utilized and actively managed homelands to the people who already lived here. I would suspect that Native American populations were pretty much at the saturation point for the ability of their lifestyle to maintain, which included both farming and hunter-gathering.
Here in Long Beach, CA deer populations are not a problem, but we have plenty of skunks, opossum, squirrels and coyotes.
I would think that by examining deer populations in areas that still resemble what they were in the 15th century we could extrapolate that into a fair estimate based on what we know about what it was like back then before cities and farms.
The problem is there are no such areas, at least south of the boreal forests of Canada. At the very least predator density is much lower than it would have been.
The 15th century deer population is a ‘guestimate’ surely. But it’s a plausible one. Forest cover in the US is around 70% what it was in 1630 per US Forest Service, and presumably hadn’t changed much from 1490’s to 1630. And there are pretty large technically non-forested areas now quite hospitable to deer (ie suburbs). Then factor in ecological imbalance now (lack of predators) relative to then and more total deer now is not implausible, doesn’t require greatly higher density than then.
I lived in relatively inner suburb of NY area in NJ as a kid in the 1970’s. I once saw a deer in an adjacent nature preserve area, after a big rain storm stopped vehicle traffic in the area. Wow, a deer less than 20 miles from midtown Manhattan! By the 1990’s when my mom still lived there, the area was absolutely overrun with them. We’d see them trotting by across her lawn in broad daylight, amazing change.
With the indians, if you have any sizable population in a given area like a village, even as few as 100 persons, and you dont have good agriculture you will quickly go thru all the wildlife for miles around. Thats deer, pheasants, rabbits, wild turkey, etc… That is why many indian tribes were usually located in an area where they could fish.
Yes they could hunt buffalo. But buffalo are nomadic so a sizable herd might only come thru an area every few months or so when so you do have a big buffalo hunt you must take alot of them and dry/alt away alot of the meat for later.
I read that Lewis and Clark’s group, about 35-60 men or so, could go thru a whole buffalo worth of meat every day. Thats 500 pounds of meat (about average for a range buffalo) for about 50 people.
With the exception of the Pacific Northwest, village dwelling Indians were always agricultural. So arguing about what might happen if you don’t have agriculture is pointless.
Do you have any evidence at all for this claim? We can start with evidence that Indian tribes were actually more likely to be located in areas with fish, and then we can move onto evidence that this was linked to fishing rather than simply a supply of fresh water and trade routes
Buffalo weren’t nomadic over most of their range, or at least no more so than deer.
A group of people that were not growing any crops whatsoever.
And even then, the idea that those men were eating 10 pounds of meat every single day seems unlikely. That would amount to around 10, 000 calories per day, which is more than an athlete in training requires, never mind the protein toxicity issues.
Modern beef cattle yield about 600 pounds of meat for each 1,000 pounds of body weight. Bison average around 1,200 lb., so 500 pounds of meat per animal doesn’t seem like an unreasonable estimate even if meat yields were much lower. I suspect that if Lewis, Clark et al. were butchering a whole buffalo per day it was because they didn’t want to carry the rest of the carcass each night since they could find lots more game before their next halt.