Sharpshooting ungulates for population reductions has been an efficient tool for wildlife managers to control disease outbreaks, limit human-wildlife conflicts, and limit negative ecological impacts. Management of overabundant white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) in urban areas has increased challenges related to land access and social conflicts. Communities that overcome these challenges can use the dense road networks to increase efficiency of removal efforts. Road access can help with stationary methods including shooting over bait, net capture, and box trap capture. It can also greatly increase efficiency of mobile darting and sharpshooting. The 33km2 cantonment area of Fort Drum, New York is a suburban community with dense housing areas and fragmented forests. A mobile sharpshooting program with USDA Wildlife Services commenced in September 2018 in order to limit human health concerns from tick transmission of Lyme disease and to restore forest regeneration. In order to maximize the success and efficiency of this program, we deployed 46 GPS collars with hourly fixes and 16 collars with fixes every 2.75 hours to measure movement of representative deer. Focal searches were used to determine if collared deer could be used as tools to predict optimal times for mobile darting and/or sharpshooting.
Results/Conclusions
During 51 mobile focal searches over a total of 148 hours from 23 May 2019 to 24 July 2019, a total of 127 deer were seen. The hourly focal detection rates were compared to average movement distance between the corresponding hourly fixes. Results from this comparison showed that deer were most seen and accessible along roadsides during peak movement periods. This was applied to mobile sharpshooting efforts in January 2020. We extended this method to create activity schedules that adapted cull timing to changing deer activity as the cull progressed. This could be applied in many other communities that are considering mobile sharpshooting or darting for sterilization. While there is the added cost of deploying collars, and there is some reduced efficiency by removing collared deer from eligibility for removal, the increased efficiency for scheduling personnel may be worth those detractions. The collared deer also allow continued monitoring of changes in deer movement as the deer adapt to increasing removal pressure.