Columnist Paula Del Giudice: Deer habitat erosion means less hunting

Thursday, May 2, 2002 | 10:01 a.m.

Paula Del Giudice's outdoors column appears Thursday. She can be reached at desertdenizens@aol.com.

Hearing that deer populations in areas 6 and 7 in northeastern Nevada are plummeting is terrible news to many hunters in the state, including me.

As a child I grew up in Elko, amidst some of the highest quality mule deer habitat in the state that also offered some of the finest trophy mule deer hunting in the West.

A combination of many impacts, including 30-plus years of fires, heavy snowfalls in December and a cold spell during the winter, have contributed to a reduction in the populations that will in turn be felt by hunters in the number of tags allotted for the area.

According to the Nevada Division of Wildlife, deer herds in big game management areas 6 and 7 have suffered losses ranging from 40 to 60 percent. Biologists say this will result in a reduction of deer hunting tags for 2002.

The deer populations in area six has dropped to an estimate of 9,300 animals as compared to 15,500 a year ago. Area 7 has dropped from 22,000 deer in 2001 to an estimate of 9,700.

"The problems with the deer in area 6 are the result of habitat loss to cheat grass and fires," said Ken Gray, NDOW biologist. "These problems started in the 1960s and 1970s as cheat grass and fires affected the winter ranges of the herd."

Cheat grass is an exotic weed from Asia, which was introduced into Nevada in the early 1900s. It grows in very dense colonies and forms a mat of extremely volatile fuels. When ignited, it takes what would have been a relatively small fire of several thousand acres and turns it into an inferno of extreme proportions. It is now common to have fires in the 50,000- to 100,000-acre range. Those areas dominated by cheat grass that burn don't recover naturally.

By 1996 more than half of the southern deer winter range in the area had been lost to fire. Over the past five years, more than 770,000 acres have burned in area 6.

When asked what sportsmen and citizens can do, Gray said, "Let the land management agencies know how important sagebrush habitat is to wildlife and how important wildlife is to you, so that more effort can be put into protecting wildlife habitats from fire and restoring areas that have already burned."

Unless the fire cycle that has been established with cheat grass as the major vegetative component is broken by doing treatments that reestablish sagebrush, those deer herds that I used to hunt before moving to Las Vegas and have written about for two decades may be only a distant memory.

Daniel Swanson, board chairman, said big game quotas and harvest objectives as proposed by the Nevada Division of Wildlife will be reviewed and discussed during the meeting. Recommendations from the board will be provided to the Nevada Board of Wildlife Commissioners prior to their quota-setting meeting May 10-11 in Reno.

Proposed legislation that will be provided to the 2003 session of the Nevada Legislature will be discussed as well. The major piece of proposed legislation would change the Nevada Division of Wildlife from a division of the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources to an independent department that would no longer be a part of another agency.