ELKINS, W.Va. — A research project to track the movements and mortality of whitetail deer in West Virginia is entering the home stretch.
“We’re definitely in the analysis phase, but we still have about 180 deer still out there on the landscape. We’re still collecting data, but we’re getting into the analysis part. We’ll keep adding that new data we’re getting for the next year,” said Brett Skelley, Whitetail Deer Project Leader for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources.
Skelley and his team for the past three years have tagged close to 350 whitetail deer in three parts of the state. The areas are Hampshire County in the CWD containment zone of the eastern panhandle, the Barbour-Upshur County study area and in the western region of the state they’ve tagged deer in the Jackson-Mason County study area.
The study is Skelley’s research for a doctorate at West Virginia University. He expected to be wrapped up with his dissertation next summer. However, already the data is showing trends.
“Hunter harvest is the leading source of mortality across all three study areas. We’ve had about 160 mortalities recorded and about 60 of those were hunter harvest. In the central and western study areas hunter harvest has been the highest source mortality, but it’s actually second in Hampshire County behind chronic wasting disease,” he said in a recent conversation for West Virginia Outdoors.
As for movement, they’re starting to see the average size of the home range of bucks in West Virginia. There’s new information regarding movement of does during breeding season and their movement activities during the birthing weeks in the spring. It’s all valuable intel for Skelley and other game managers in the state to make decisions on the management of whitetail deer.
“There’s a lot of stuff we can do with the information. Survival probabilities are really important. Also while the primary source of mortality is hunter harvest, there are other sources of mortality out there which are really important. The movement data, there’s just so much you can mine from that like what habitat deer are using and what cover type,” he explained.
The information is expected to be valuable to hunters to also make decisions about scouting and selection off hunting opportunities and locations. Those choices can be narrowed greatly knowing the movements and habits of deer, specifically in West Virginia.
Another conclusion which is becoming more and more evident is just how hard CWD is hitting the state’s deer herd in the eastern panhandle and what a horrific disease it can be for the animals which contract the virus.
“We have does we’ve found dead in Hampshire County with collars. At that time of year they should be a 120 pound animal, but when we get them back to the lab for a necropsy we find they weigh about 60 pounds, at least half the weight they should be,” he explained.
There are no more collars being added to new specimens in the research, but the old collars are still out there and the data from those collars is still being tracked. Skelley said eventually when the collars are done, they have a mechanism which will cause them to blow the connection and simply fall off the deer at a certain point. At that time, the collar will give off a sensor that is is no longer moving and with the GPS system, Skelley can track it to a pinpoint location to retrieve.
He also stressed it’s okay for hunters to kill a deer wearing the GPS collar as long as the season is open and hunters follow all other game laws. The DNR would like to have the collar returned if you happen to kill one wearing the device.