Stewardship Roundtable

Here is another article on leasing land for hunting. This one cites Julia Allen from Readington Township.   $32,0000 a year for hunting leases…..wow!

Charging for hunting on non-profit lands was an idea that was discussed at a Stewardship Roundtable meeting last year.  The numbers that were thrown around for typical hunting leases were much higher than I expected.  Here is an article about Washington Township, Morris County consideration of leasing municipal lands to hunt clubs click here for the article.

If the numbers in this article are correct, leasing hunting rights could solve some of our stewardship budget problems.  However, I think if you charged this much it would be hard to place any demands on the hunting club such preferential harvesting of does and sharing the property with the general public.  Perhaps there is a fee that would strike a nice balance between meeting the stewardship budget requirements of managing a particular property and keeping control of the important aspects of deer management.

Here is a great article on the restoration taking place at South Mountain Reservation.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I can’t say enough about how impressed I am by the conservation leadership of the South Mountain Conservancy, Essex County, Joseph DiVincenzo, and of course, New Jersey Audubon and New Jersey Conservation Foundation.

Note how expensive this is – $800,000.  If we were to measure the acreage of forests in NJ that need to be restored and multiply that by the per-acre costs of this restoration we’d have monetary value we could put on the ecological problem of overabundant deer.   This sounds like a fun exercise .  Anyone up for it?

Here is another interesting example of how our urban counties, especially Essex and Union, are on the cutting edge of forest restoration and land stewardship. Be sure to check out the comments at the bottom of the article.

Preparation for prescribed burning, Schiff Nature Preserve, 3/01/2009

I spent part of this past Sunday working with the NJ Forest Fire Service preparing for prescribed burning this spring at Schiff Nature Preserve.  This will be my third season of prescribed burning.

We have three goals with our program.  First and foremost, we want to reduce the wildfire danger to our neighbors by reducing the amount of flammable vegetation close to homes.  Second, the preparation work, if conducted properly and carefully, can help with maintenance and construction of woods roads and trails. There is one inaccessible portion of the Preserve where we will be creating a new trail that will also act as a firebreak.

Finally, prescribed burning can help maintain and restore degraded forests and meadows.  We have approximately 30 acres of native meadow habitat dominated by warm season grasses.  Prescribed burning is a proven way to effectively manage native warm-season grasses.  For our meadow management, we follow best management guidelines developed by the Xerces Society.  The Xerces Society recommends only burning 30% of a particular habitat patch in a given year to ensure long-term diversity of native polinators. 

Prescribed Burn Locations, Schiff Nature Preserve, Mendham, NJ

In the forested areas of the Preserve, we want to reduce the density of non-native invasive plants which dominate the understory and inhibit forest regeneration.  Frequent burning will reduce the density of non-native invasive plants. At the same time we implement this prescribed burning plan, we are overhauling our white-tailed deer management program, which up to now has had limited success at reducing the over-browsing of our native plants.

The idea is that as the deer herd is reduced, the invasives will concurrently be reduced by yearly prescribed burning.  Eventually we will reduce the frequency of burning and hope to start to see native plants regenerating in the growing space vacated by the invasives.   I am a big proponent of adaptive management, so we will also be developing a simple monitoring protocol in order to determine if we are getting the ecological results we are expecting.  

I am interested to learn how others are using prescribed burning as a land management tool.

Pre-Settlement Forest - 1700 A.D., Harvard Forest

Even-aged forest with severe white-tailed deer browse

This article about overabundant elk (additional link here) and discussion about re-introduction of wolves on the Olympic Peninsula is fascinating.   It made me recall how the current overabundance of large herbivores is ecologically novel.  

Our native herbivores evolved with predators, thus primeval plant communities evolved to predator/prey dynamics that didn’t have human influence.  When you remove this predator/prey dynamic, herbivores change behavior, their populations increase, and plant communities change.  Certain plants are more resistant to being browsed, while others are extremely sensitive.  This observation is nothing new, in fact, Aldo Leopold pointed this more than half a century ago critizing wholesale predator reduction as a wildlife management technique.  Here is a very rough, admittedly oversimplified time line:

• 40,000 years ago – 1500’s, Native Americans inhabited this Continent and had an impact on herbivore populations, potentially driving some to extinction, and purposely increasing populations of others.  They also had an impact on herbivore populations by reducing predators.  
• 1500’s – 1880’s, Europeans settled North America, agrarian society continued subsistence hunting of wild herbivores and hunted many native herbivores to local extirpation.  At the same time, European settlers eliminated predators.
• 1880’s – 1940’s,  Urbanization of North America, market hunting drastically lowers populations of large herbivores, scientific wildlife management begins as a reaction to loss of large herbivores, wide-scale elimination of predators continues, and re-introduction of extirpated herbivores is carried out, subsistence hunting transforms to recreational hunting.  
• 1940’s – today  Suburbanizaion,  As scientific management of wildlife became wildly successful at restoring extirpated herbivore populations, the underlying landscape changes and we become a more suburban society.  

Without a doubt, highly regulated recreational hunting can increase herbivore populations, but we have not proven that recreational hunting can control herbivore populations the way predators, native Americans, or subsistence colonials did.  Currently, we don’t have the ability to reduce herbivore populations down to what my professor Oz Schmitz  would call “ecological carrying capacity.” 

I can understand how ecological carrying capacity is a bit of a fluffy concept to some, but clearly here in New Jersey we are far from attaining it.  Examples abound.  In the Pinelands, we can’t figure out how to regenerate an Atlantic white cedar forest or sustain populations of rare plants without excluding white-tailed deer.  In the Highlands, traditional sivlicultural practices designed to regenerate forests also don’t work without fencing.  We clearly have herbivore populations that are above ecological carrying capacity.

Wildlife management originally focused on large herbivores and developed as a  reaction to the problem of local, severe decline and often extirpation of local populations.  This underabundance drove the choices and ethic in wildlife management and has lead to it being overly successful at bringing back native herbivores.  

Wildlife management agencies have failed to adapt to overabundance for a few reasons. The economic incentives for wildlife management agencies were and still are tied to this underabundance.  Wildlife agencies are funded by hunting licences, so the better (and easier) the hunting, the more licences they sell and the more revenue they receive.  This leads to agencies managing populations to overabundance.   Furthermore, they have failed to adapt management techniques to the suburbanization of the landscape.  In New Jersey, the edge habitat created by suburbia provides ideal habitat for white-tailed deer and is responsible for increased populations.  

Wildlife management of large herbivores has been too successful at increasing populations and is leading to degradation of ecosystems in New Jersey and across the continent.  We need to adopt a different wildlife management ethic focused not on underabundance but rather on ecological carrying capacity.  We also need to change the economic incentives that drive wildlife agencies.  Only then can we develop effective tools to deal with one of the biggest threats to our natural lands.

I’ll elaborate on theses ideas over the next several months…

White-tailed deer

So why is it that Essex County at South Mountain Reservation and Union County at Watchung Reservation have emerged as leaders when it comes to management of white-tailed deer? 

The 10-day hunt in the South Mountain Reservation is designed to cull white-tailed deer, which reproduce quickly and are a problem for many New Jersey communities because they ravage vegetation, cause traffic accidents and carry ticks that spread Lyme disease.

Essex County Executive Joseph N. DiVincenzo Jr. said the hunt will be held from Tuesday until Feb. 26. He said the area “is being devastated” by the hungry animals.

North Jersey.com, 1/23/2009

I know several non-profit conservation organizations have been working for over a decade with these counties, installing demonstration deer exclosures and helping to build the case for more aggressive deer management.  So there certainly has been a lot of public education.  But there has been a lot of public education throughout the state, yet other counties aren’t as aggressive in dealing with this devastating problem. 

The one thing that seems to be missing in Essex and Union Counties is a strong place-based hunting constituency.  Both counties are completely urbanized and suburbanized and lost the rural hunting culture a long time ago.   My theory is that this frees them to manage their deer herd without the biases of traditional wildlife management. They were free to consult ecologists and other experts at lowering deer populations, rather than more traditional deer managers that want to bag a big buck.

This realization is counter-intuitive.  You would think that as the rural culture disappears, support for hunting deer would decline.  Essex County Executive Joseph N. DiVencenzo and others in Union County have been able to make a very sophisticated political argument to a suburban and urban constituency:  deer population control is necessary for public safety, public health, and because they “ravage vegetation”.

Here is link to an article today about how we have fewer deer in NJ.  

Both the deer herd and the number of successful hunters have been in decline in recent years.

Larry Herrighty, assistant director for the state Division of Fish and Wildlife, says that’s attributable to a smaller deer herd, now about 135,000 in number, being thinned not just through hunting but through suburban development that’s led to lower breeding rates and higher fatal encounters with traffic.

REALLY?? FEWER DEER IN NJ BECAUSE OF SUBURBAN DEVELOPMENT??

USDA photo by Scott Bauer

The Star Ledger had an article today about the deer management program at the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. Seems like Refuge Managers think it has been such a success that they are not interested in continuing to lower the population.

Still, Bitler said the dwindling [hunter] interest is not necessarily a bad thing.

“Someone asked me if I was concerned,” Bitler said. “No, I’m actually happy. I don’t want a lot of deer taken.”

The article makes is seem like we have reached an ecological carrying capacity in the Great Swamp.  The Refuge Managers seems to think that:

The number of deer living in the 12-square-mile area has been reduced by half, to about 220. And the area’s low-growing vegetation has gradually recovered, giving birds and rodents a place to live.

Could it be that we have reached ecological carrying capacity in the Great Swamp?  Or is it just a matter of it being too difficult to hunt, and we reached hunter “carrying capacity”?