White-tail populations head toward delisting

According to Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Biologist Paul Meyers, who is stationed at the Julia Butler Hansen Refuge for Columbian White-tailed Deer, there has been a proposal to downlist Columbian White-tailed Deer.

This could mean a move from the highest level of listing, endangered, to threatened. Whether they will be delisted, or taken off the list of endangered species completely, he cannot say. The decision makers work in a different branch of the service while he works in the field on recovery.

“A recovery plan was written in 1983,” Meyers said. “In order for a population to be delisted, there are certain criteria that we need to meet. We have to establish at least three subpopulations of 50 or more animals on what is considered to be secure habitat, where there is no expectation of radical habitat change. There are a lot of places to put deer, but when you get into the definition of secure habitat, we are limited.”

According to Meyers, Puget Island is now considered secure habitat because of some state land and DNR land, and because it has proven it can support a good population of deer for the last 40 years.

"We are at a 10 year high in deer populations just about everywhere," Meyers said, including on Puget Island, Tenasillahe Island, the Julia Butler Hansen Refuge and the Westport area. Each area has a population over 50.

“Regionally, something is going on,” he said, “and everything is looking pretty good.

“This population is kind of unique. There are two major populations of Columbian White-tailed Deer. The population in Douglas County, Oregon, took off as soon as they put limits on hunting and started protecting them. They’ve got a bunch of contiguous habitat down there. The same thing didn’t happen here because we’ve got a bunch of habitat barriers.”

There are 5,000-6,000 deer in the Douglas County population. Here along the Columbia River, the numbers are much lower, estimated to be around 900.

Meyers described the lower Columbia habitat as “postage stamps” of habitat surrounded by coniferous forest. Because this kind of landscape is a major obstacle to this population of deer, the only way to reestablish population elsewhere was to pick them up and move them.

Thus the translocation program.

“We’ve probably moved 60-70 deer down to Ridgfield. We are in our last year of moving them. We’ve only got a couple weeks left, in fact. So far this year, we’ve moved nine deer from Puget Island and 14 from the Westport area. Our expectation is that that population is going to be over 100 animals in a couple years and if so, we will have reached our recovery goals.

Then it will be time for another analysis. And they will watch and wait, because it will take time to make sure that the Ridgfield population is stable.

For now, Meyers and his colleagues are in the field in order to translocate a couple more deer before March ends in order to meet their quota.