It’s going to be awfully ironic if a bunch of imported canines is the force that gets deer-hunting regulations in South Carolina changed for the first time in ages.
That’s what appears to be in the works. Largely because of a study on fawn mortality at the Savannah River Nuclear Plant, South Carolina deer hunters may find a very different landscape sometime in the near future.
There are rumblings that the S.C. Department of Natural Resources plans to send a package of proposed regulation changes to the state legislature over the next few years reflecting that all isn’t rosy with the state’s deer herd.
First off, there’s the matter of a cyclical change in habitat across the Palmetto State and much of the Southeast. According to Charles Ruth, the deer project leader for SCDNR, South Carolina got in the whitetail deer business 30 years ago when construction really boomed and timber prices skyrocketed. Thousands of acres of timber were cut, and over a 10-year-period, cutovers of young slash pines sprung up, cutovers that basically served as “deer nurseries.”
Now, those pines are maturing, they’ve been thinned a couple of times and have shaded out all the undergrowth, and that great deer habitat has been degraded. It can no longer sustain the huge numbers of deer that South Carolina hunters got used to seeing over the past 20 years.
That alone, according to Ruth, is probably enough to make SCDNR ask the legislature to consider a few regulation changes. But when you add in those canines — song dogs, if you will — things get a lot clearer.
SCDNR’s Savannah River project has centered on how many fawns are winding up in the stomachs of coyotes, and the results are astounding. According to Ruth, fawn mortality is 80 percent on the site. It takes five does each bearing a single fawn to get one fawn to maturity. And of those fawns that aren’t making it out of their spotted coats, 70 percent of them are winding up as coyote-chow. Extrapolate that out, and 56 percent of all the fawns being dropped are being eaten by coyotes.
It’s no wonder that SCDNR has changed regulations to make it a lot easier for hunters to target coyotes, but Ruth said the only way to really make a dent in their population is through trapping, which many Lowcountry plantations and hunt clubs are starting to employ.
Ruth said coyotes are now in all 46 counties, and their range appears to be expanding. That’s bad news for fawns, even though Ruth explained that coyotes are opportunistic feeders. At different times of the year, their diet consists almost entirely of persimmons and berries, or rodents, or small-game birds and animals, or foxes, or neighborhood dogs and cats that are left outside to fend for themselves.
But overall, the realization is that the regulations under which deer have been managed in South Carolina for the past 20 or 30 years may not be the right fit for the changing nature of the herd.
What kinds of changes are being discussed? Nothing is written in stone, but a statewide bag limit on deer — and a season buck limit — are probably in the mix. If the deer population is sliding downward, extremely liberal either-sex hunting is probably going to be examined.
Of course, the legislature holds the keys to the bank vault. Will powerful legislators shake their heads and win out? What will come out of the next session? Deer me, that’s a good question. Hopefully something.
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