Penn State Deer-Forest Study

In September 2014, we published our first blog post. Ah, the good old days when getting blog ideas was easy. Almost a decade later, we’re writing about osteophagia and counting squirrels. I’m not really sure what that says about us. I’ll leave that up to you.

I am going to resurrect some of that old material. And when I say old, I mean old. In November 2014, a tagged fawn reappeared as a teenager. It was cool to document one of our tagged deer living into her golden years. But a few months later, we got reports of 2 more teenage does tagged in previous studies. And 2 of the 3 were still alive.

In 2021, I posted a tribute to our oldest known alumni, a doe whose minimum age was 16.5 years. She could get her driver’s license!

Get ready for another sequel.

Three reports from 3 different areas in 3 weeks’ time.

Let’s start with the baby of the group and the only deceased member. Captured as a fawn on February 13, 2013, she was one of 550 deer captured as part of a project to evaluate the survival and harvest rates of deer in the rifle and shotgun areas in Southeast Pennsylvania . On February 5, 2024, she was found less than a mile from her capture site in Green Lane Park, another victim of the road just a few months shy of her 12^th birthday.

She probably crossed that road countless times in her life. We’ll have to ask Duane to calculate the probably of getting hit by a car. [Annually, about 5-7% of our collared deer get hit by a car – suggesting she had a 46-58% chance of getting hit over her 12-year life. I guess the odds caught up with her. DRD]

I contacted the crew leader to see if she might have any photos. After handling that many deer, photos just don’t rise to the top, but she did dig up this one. It is from the capture site when they were patterning the deer activity at the net. Is that doe fawn the same deer? She very well may be.

Report #2 came one day later. This time from a gentleman who hunts in WMU 3C. He reported harvesting a buck with ear tags in 2012 but he called back to report another deer he has been seeing on his trail camera for the last 10-12 years. She is still wearing her VHF collar, but he has never been able to get a clear picture of her ear tag until now. Are you ready? She was captured in February 2009 as a juvenile. Which means she is coming up on her 16^th birthday. She was part of a study investigating the biological and social effects of a 7-day concurrent season. He reports he has seen fawns with her most years including last year.

Lastly and maybe the most exciting, the Northern Crew was getting photos of a deer with an old VHF collar at one of the Clover traps. On February 29^th, she finally decided to step in almost 13 years to the day we caught her the first time as a fawn.

Doe with VHF collar at entrance of CLover trap

She was part of the same study as the previous deer in WMU 2G. Now she is adding data to the Deer Forest Study and sporting a fancy new GPS collar which means we’ll be able to get movement data on her. This year she’ll be celebrating her 14^th birthday and 13^th year as a research animal.

doe with VHF collar standing at door of Clover trap

It is amazing to encounter these animals after so many years, but it has taken more than 20 years of trapping and tagging to do so. It speaks to the long-term commitment that the Pennsylvania Game Commission has made to better manage this public resource. In collaboration with the USGS PA Cooperative Fish & Wildlife Research Unit, these 3 studies have produced over 16 scientific publications, provided the science behind numerous management recommendations, supported 12 MS and PhD students for their thesis research, and given us this blog. Decades in the making and worth it.

-Jeannine Fleegle
Wildlife Biologist
PA Game Commission

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13 comments on “Decades in the Making”

Can they still get enough to eat with their teeth in such bad shape? (jawbone photo)

Duane Diefenbach says:

March 29, 2024 at 10:48 am

If they can reproduce at 13, 14, 15 years old they must be getting enough to eat.
The Big Boo says:

March 29, 2024 at 12:23 pm

My son shot an old doe matriarch with teeth that bad or worse. She did have a fawn that year. However, the photo doesn’t show the upper jaw which has two incisor front teeth. The front of their lower jaw is a hard palette. This allows deer to strip and eat woody browse and young leaves which is 70% of their diet. An old deer cannot do that because the incisors get worn to the gum. The matriarch my son shot was literally full of grass. She only ate grass like that because it is all she could “gum” into her mouth. She was basically starving. Yet, deer are highly resilient.
The Big Boo says:

March 29, 2024 at 12:43 pm

I also want to add a few more things about the matriarch doe my son shot. How much older than 8 years or so is unknown due to lack of any other data. But she had likely been on my farm almost a decade, fawning maybe 10-12 deer. All summer we watched her as the matriarch of a 6-8 familial doe group. She knew my land far better than I did. Having to cull her was hard, but I think she would have starved by the next spring. She taught me a-lot about deer. Loving deer means sometimes you have to do the hard things.

Thanks for all these updates! Enjoy reading them. Amazing that they can live that long out in the wild!!

Never knew 3C was in play for this study.

Duane Diefenbach says:

March 29, 2024 at 10:47 am

It’s not. We have had many different studies and study areas over the past 20+ years. These are some deer that get reported to us long after the study has ended.
- Joe Matej says:
  
  March 31, 2024 at 5:55 pm
  
  So this deer was captured in 3C? 3C was at one time a capture location? That is what I must have missed, that 3C was ever in the study (s)

Thank you for the interesting data on deer that live a long time across the state. In the many years I spent removing road kills from highways in McKean Cameron and Elk Counties I would often find mature does that were seven or eight years old. There was no overharvest of female deer up this way over the past 45 years by hunters, bears or coyotes. And there still isn’t. The only real factor that kept deer populations low in any area up this way was the lack of good plants to eat because of decades of overbrowsing. And I’ve been lucky and blessed to observe the habitat as close as I can up this way since 1970. Keep up the good long term work.

Thanks to the people of Pennsylvania for continuous funding instead of cutting the money when other things seem more important. Long term studies are critical not just for the results they currently produce but to answer future questions that have not yet been asked.

Awesome

These articles are always interesting and informative. Please keep them coming. And, let us know if there is anything we can do to ensure that going forward.

It is great to see the deer that have managed to elude the ultimate predator for so long. You folks are doing a great job of supporting and monitoring the deer herd. Thank you and keep up the good work.

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