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83 °F Forecast | Road Cams Saturday, June 19, 2004 Today's News | Classifieds | Autos | Homes | Jobs | Tempo | Health | Community | Home Delivery SECTIONS Home Page Local News Sports Business Obituaries Life Opinion - Politics Tempo AP News Weather Classified Archives Site Map SPECIAL SECTIONS Since We Asked Outdoor Journal Prime Times Wellness Connection Readers' Choice Real Estate Showcase Joy Magazine Homelife Magazine Wedding Guide Rogue Valley's Finest EXTRA Newspaper in Education Personals Movie Times TV Times E The People MARKETPLACE Find a Car Find a Home Find a Job Classifieds Place an ad eSouthernOregon Automotive Communities Entertainment Publications Recreation Calendar CUSTOMER SERVICE Frequent Questions Advertising Information Home Delivery Employment Contact Us Media Kit Network Affiliate Oregon Road Conditions & Cams Email Story to a Friend June 17, 2004 Once-sparce whitetails now face limited harvest period Outdoors By MARK FREEMAN Mail Tribune When Douglas County’s isolated population of rare Columbian white-tailed deer were taken off the federal Endangered Species List last year, state and federal biologists saw the move as a wildlife success story. Now, state biologists want at least a handful of hunters to see whitetails through the cross-hairs of their rifles. The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission has given tentative approval to a 12-day rifle-hunting season with an estimated 10 tags for whitetail buck in 2005, the first such hunt there since the 1970s. The hunt is small part of an overall Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife strategy to help reduce whitetail herd densities and help re-populate other historic whitetail habitat in the Umpqua River drainage. With herd numbers four times higher than what is considered recovered and ratios eclipsing 20 bucks per 100 does, the county’s once-decimated whitetails can absorb this limited hunt, says Steve Denney, the ODFW’s Umpqua Watershed manager. Advertisement "The populations are quite healthy," says Denney, who was part of the 25-year effort at helping white-tailed deer recovery. "We felt they could withstand a limited buck harvest. "The hunting is not going to impact the population," he says. Environmental activist Frances Eatherington bristles at the notion of shooting members of one of the few big-game animals to recover after once teetering on the brink of extinction. Eatherington, from the group Umpqua Watersheds, says she believes Douglas County’s whitetails should never have lost their endangered status. The population is still far less than historic numbers and she believes they are too susceptible to disease and habitat loss to risk losing any animals to hunting. "I don’t think this makes any sense," Eatherington says. "There’s plenty of blacktails, not whitetails. If you want to go kill deer, go kill blacktails." But Fish and Wildlife Commission member Medford attorney Don Denman believes authorizing the hunt meets the commission’s goals of protecting wildlife and allowing sport-hunting where appropriate. "The philosophy is pretty strong — if a species is recovered, we still don’t want to just put it in a trophy case and say stay away from them," Denman says. "If it’s recovered, it’s recovered. And if all the figures point to (limited hunting) being OK, I feel let’s do it." Denney says the long road to recovery from their troubled history proves whitetails meet that threshold. First noticed by Lewis and Clark along the lower Columbia River in 1806, the Columbia white-tailed deer once extended along the lower Columbia River and throughout the Willamette and Umpqua basins in lands sandwiched by the Cascade and Coast ranges. But the draining of their wetland habitats and unrestricted hunting whittled the whitetails down to two remnant populations — Douglas County and the lower Columbia. The deer were deemed endangered 10 years before the Endangered Species Act was created in 1977, when the population was estimated at less than 500 animals. All hunting of them stopped. Later, whitetails reached the state’s Endangered Species List as well. County, state and federal authorities launched a recovery plan that set a goal of rebuilding the Umpqua herds to 1,500 animals. The plan also set a goal of having at least 500 deer living in at least 5,500 acres of "secure" habitat. The federal Bureau of Land Management acquired a 6,580-acre ranch and designated it whitetail habitat. By 1996, Douglas County sported a whitetail population around 5,000 animals, and the Umpqua’s whitetails became the first mammal dropped from state’s endangered species rolls. The federal government began its de-listing process, which culminated with last year’s lifting of the endangered status. "The general feeling is that the deer have qualified for (federal) de-listing since at least 1996," Denney says. "It just took a while for the process." Now, the ODFW’s strategy is to start trapping and transplanting its whitetails into more useable habitat, in part to have the herds grow as well as spread them out so no single disease outbreak or wildfire kills off too many whitetails or their useable habitat. Included in that is thinning a few bucks by sport-hunting. "It’s part of a bigger plan to help reduce the densities and reduce the likelihood of a catastrophic event that could threaten the population," Denney says. The commission agreed Friday, tentatively approving the single hunt for Oct. 1-12 next year. Final approval is set for October. In the meantime, ODFW biologists will give the hunt a number and define its boundaries. Tag numbers will be set next June based on spring herd counts. Denney considers the biological case for whitetail hunting rock-solid and part of the agency’s overall whitetail management. "You strive to have self-sustaining populations," Denney says. "Part of that self-sustaining is sustaining harvest." 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