Deer have never had it so good

By Donnie Johnston

I was about 16 years old when I saw my first deer in the wild.

It was August 1963 and I was groundhog hunting in Tubby Pilling's back hayfield. I walked down a hill toward the old Tutt place and there, between a small patch of woods and Apperson's Branch, was a buck, still in velvet, grazing on late orchard grass.

The scene is still vivid in my memory. Sensing my presence, the deer raised his head, looked at me for about 15 seconds, and then loped off into the trees.

Today deer are everywhere. I see them standing in my yard and I drive them out of my garden. You can't drive five miles down a country road after dark without seeing one. But that's not the way it was when I was growing up.

Seeing a deer back then was so rare that a sighting would be the topic of conversation for a week or two. There just weren't any of these animals, at least in my part of the world.

Oh, there were a few in the thick forests down around Richardsville in eastern Culpeper County and there was said to be a herd on the Fort A. P. Hill military base. You might see one now and again in the woods of Spotsylvania or Orange counties, but that was about it. A deer sighting was extremely rare.

I remember one afternoon when a local farmer came into my aunt's store and excitedly reported that he had seen a buck about a mile up the road on Warren Utz's place. Two men jumped in their cars and I hopped on my bicycle and we all hurried to try and get a glimpse of Bambi in the wild. The animal was gone before we got there.

By 1900 most of the deer in Central Virginia had been hunted almost to extinction. It was only after stricter game laws were enacted in the early part of the 20th century that these animals began to make a comeback.

That comeback was aided by the Game Department's reintroduction of deer in certain areas like Richardsville and the federal government's restocking efforts during in the new Shenandoah National Park in the 1940s.

By the time I was a teenager, the deer from the park herds in Madison and Rappahannock counties were ranging east while those from the Richardsville area were heading west. The two genetic pools would come together in the late 1960s and now these animals are in ever field and forest.

Animal populations often take big swings. Deer, of course, were hunted until their numbers were few. Other species, however, proliferate and then almost disappear without human intervention.

In the early 1930s, for example, the muskrat population exploded westward from the quiet streams and marshes of Eastern Virginia into the fast-moving rivers and creeks of the Piedmont. Then, in the 1940s, they disappeared just as abruptly as had arrived.

By 1960 they were back. When I was about 15, there were muskrats in almost every pond and small stream within 25 miles of my house. They survived in great numbers for about a decade, then disappeared in the middle 1970s. There has been no prominent return since.

Beavers, gone for half a century, suddenly returned to the Piedmont in the early 1960s. Over the past 60 years their populations have continued to build and ebb for no apparent reason.

Raccoons were almost extinct in the 1930s but made a strong comeback in the 1970s.

Red foxes were plentiful in the 1950s until a rabies epidemic took its toll. Their numbers built back up in the 1970s but began to decline in the late 1980s when coyotes arrived and started to compete for food.

So it has been during my lifetime. The inhabitants of the woods, fields and streams have changed several times. Quail were plentiful when I was a boy but now they are rarely seen. And rabbits are now making a comeback after populations dwindled in the 1970s.

Some wildlife population changes have unquestionably been influenced by man. Others seem to be just a natural fluctuation.

One thing is certain, most every species of wildlife has learned to co-exist with man, deer being a prime example. Experts say there are more of these animals in Virginia today then when Jamestown was established.

That's understandable. There were no 100-acre soybean fields or acres of shelled corn on the ground in 1607. Deer have never had it so good.

Things have certainly changed since I saw my first deer in the wild 60 years ago this month.

Donnie Johnston's columns generally appear in Town & County and twice per week on the Opinion page. Reach him at djohn40330@aol.com. This editorial was published in the Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, Va.) and distributed by Tribune Content Agency.