Renovations are exciting. Sure they can be a headache but when complete, it’s like a whole new world. Many stores temporarily closed for a refresh and repair – a local Starbucks, your favorite restaurant, maybe even Target! Gasp! What if it’s the grocery store that we use? That would definitely impact where we shop for food. Maybe we avoid the area until it reopens, or maybe we pass by longing for the day we can get donuts at the bakery again. Either way it’s a sacrifice.
What about animals when their figurative grocery store closes for renovation? How do they respond?
Deer 12403 may give us some insight into this. He’s an adult buck captured back in February 2020. Deer 12403 is a long-time Deer-Forest Study participant collecting over 8,100 locations across 3 years! Below are all locations for 2020. Nothing much out of the ordinary and he appreciates the power line as a convenient travel corridor across his kingdom.
Moving into 2021 an interesting pattern starts to take shape. Do you notice anything?
I break down the locations into a season to see if that helps.
Because we know you like movies, let’s make a fun animation of the locations in November.
The red box is where there appears to be those hard lines from above. We see the deer go in, stay there, then leave a few times. He also appears to be walking along the line at times, and never seems to go inside after November 22. Let’s look at December.
These plots show straight line paths from consecutive points, but no points ever land inside the box.
In 2022, there is not a single point in the box. I figured there was a forest cutting based on the aerial imagery and a fence was put up to prevent this guy from getting in.
Sure enough a data layer about forest cuttings tell us an overstory removal and shelterwood cut was started in 2020 and likely wrapped up with a fence in 2021. The purpose of these cuts is to restock the shelves in his grocery store. But rather than completely alter his movements he kept checking the windows to see if they were open yet. I checked to see if there was a fence, and indeed there was. In fact, the fence has some openings where trees fell on it.
These types of forestry practices are common and allow for the cut areas to regenerate for a few years. Then the fence can come down and deer can forage without causing excessive damage to trees. Unfortunately, his collar went off the air in February 2023, so we will never know if he got into his fully stocked store earlier than the managers intended.
-Jacob Trowbridge
PhD Graduate student
Department of Ecosystem Science and Management
PA Cooperative Fish & Wildlife Research Unit
