ABSTRACT
About 100 years ago, deer were brought back from the brink of extinction by a consortium of concerned hunters and newly established state wildlife agencies acting to eliminate market hunting and heavily restrict deer hunting, including prohibition of doe hunting. To the great joy of hunters, these actions, in serendipitous concert with vast timber harvest operations creating vast quantities of quality deer forage, succeeded in vastly increasing deer abundance. To the sorrow of foresters, farmers, and ecologists, the resulting deer management overcorrections in the ensuing decades resulted in deer of such abundance that forest understories, the browse and cover they provided, and obligate wildlife species nose-dived and complaints by farmers of excessive deer impact increased. Corrective deer management steps, including encouragement of harvesting antlerless deer, occurred in roughly 30-year cycles of boom-and-bust deer abundance and managed to limit somewhat deer population explosions and related habitat degradation. Management efforts to reduce deer density represented responses to decades of complaints about impacts of overabundant deer herds by farmers, foresters, and biologists. These were followed by decades of complaints by hunters of too few deer and reductions in efforts by state game agencies to reduce deer density and impact, reigniting the rollercoaster ride of deer abundance and associated deer impacts. The repeated 30-year cycles of boom-and-bust deer density and impact occurred at intervals too short to permit recovery of defenseless understory seedlings, shrubs, and herbaceous plants in the down abundance cycles, and to this day, these plants are scarce or totally lacking in deer-impacted forests. The institutional memory of natural resource agencies responsible for regulating deer harvests should be long enough to factor in the environmentally devastating effects of yo-yoing deer density and avoid them. It is critically important for natural resource agencies to adopt the decades-long perspective required for sustainable management of deer and other forest resources and to resist pressures by hunters whose shorter-term memories may be influenced by values and culture that exclude consideration for sustainability of forest resources other than deer.
