Looking Back on Whitetail

Andrew McKean from Outdoor Life. He shared with me a fascinating perspective on the history of white tailed deer in our country. “As the homesteaders were hacking and hewing their way across the woodlands, they displaced a lot of deer. If they were not killed for subsistence, they were killed for the marketplace. This was before regulated hunting and so from the mid to late 1800s to the early 1930s, there were really no deer. The ones that did exist were pushed to these very remote areas, either the northern Midwest or remote nasty swamps in the South and it took a lot of years of not funding them to let them come back and then of course as land use changed, farms got bigger with fewer people on the landscape, deer just occupied that vacant habitat until now when we are worried about hitting them on the road. So at one time, whitetail were in jeopardy? Yes. If there had been an endangered species act around 1900 I have no doubt that Whitetail would've been on it. Compare the Whitetail with mule deer. There are many more white tail. Mule deer habitat requirements are pretty rigid. They need wide open spaces, they will use agricultural crops when they need to but they prefer to be away from people and human habitation.