A Deer Dilemma : The Reasons Vary, but Experts Agree Eastern Sierra Herds Are in Trouble

Find the common thread running through recent experiences of these three Eastern Sierra deer hunters:

--Butch Kuflak, Hermosa Beach--”I shot a 5-by-3 buck (one with five points on the left side of its antlers, three on the right) near Olive Lake, and his rack should have been 28 or 30 inches across. Instead, it was tiny, 18 inches. Also, not only did he have no upper teeth, it looked to me as if he never had any. His bottom teeth were real long. And the buck was very small, it weighed 100 pounds.”

--Cliff Lawrence, Niland--”I’ve been hunting the same part of the Sierra back country every deer season since 1944 and I’ve seen a noticeable decline in the health of the deer herds in the last 15 years. For years, people in my group would get 6-by-4s, 5-by-5s, 4-by-3s, every year. And the racks were all over 30 inches. They all weighed somewhere between 150 and 180 pounds. In the last five years, the bucks we’ve gotten have averaged 110 to 115 pounds.”

--Rick Rockel, Bridgeport--”I’ve been weighing deer on a scale in front of my sporting goods store for 20 years, and I know we’ve got major problems with our deer herds. Ten, 20 years ago, a forked horn taken in this country weighed 100 to 115 pounds. Last year, all the forked horns I weighed were between 60 and 90 pounds. The heaviest buck I weighed all season was 137 pounds.”

Plainly, something seems to be wrong with Eastern Sierra deer herds.

Ron Thomas, a biologist for the Department of Fish and Game who is based in Coleville, said recently that buck-to-doe ratios in the Eastern Sierra are between 10 and 12 to 100, when counts of between 20 and 25 are considered healthy.

“The deer up here have a lot of problems,” he said recently, in a conversation about the deer season, which ended Monday.

“For one thing, we’re simply harvesting too many bucks in the hunting season. There’s no other way to explain a declining buck-to-doe ratio. We know our data on that is good, we use helicopters and we count over 3,000 deer on their winter range.

“But the buck harvest is only one problem our deer have. We’ve also got some environmental problems that affect deer, some political problems and highway problems. The Marine Corps is building a housing project near Coleville, right in the middle of a deer migration route. It couldn’t be in a worse place. Near Mammoth Lakes, there’s a proposal for a hotel and golf course right in the middle of a winter range area. And we lose about 300 deer a year to road kills on (U.S.) 395.”

Hunters, packers, biologists, and others in the Eastern Sierra region, from Lone Pine to Coleville, who follow results of the annual fall three-week season, seem to agree that deer in the region are in a depressed state and that something needs to be done.

But that’s where they stop agreeing.

Not all of them even agreed when the Fish and Game Commission split the huge X9 zone, which used to run nearly 300 miles along the entire east face of the Sierra, roughly from Inyokern to Topaz Lake. A small northern chunk of X9, from the north shore of Mono Lake to Topaz Lake, was split off, designated X12, and was limited to 3,000 hunters. The purpose was to reduce hunting pressure on the particularly hard-hit East Walker and West Walker herds.

Said Jim Brock, owner of Brock’s Sporting Goods in Bishop: “We used to have about 13,000 hunters in X9, and 70% of them hunted that Coleville-Walker-Bridgeport area. The whole idea of the separate zone was to take the heat off those deer.”

Feelings tend to run high on deer management issues. Rockel pushed hard for a separate zone and reduced hunting pressure in the Eastern Sierra. He says he received a phone call from a Bishop taxidermist who physically threatened him.

Rockel is a controversial figure, something of a guru, not only to out-of-town deer hunters but to trout fishermen who come to ply the waters of nearby Bridgeport Lake and the region’s blue ribbon wild trout stream, the East Walker River. His store, Ken’s Sporting Goods, is a time warp. It’s in a 100-year-old building, next door to a 105-year-old building, the historic Mono County Courthouse.

“It was a good, positive step,” said Rockel, of the new zone, X12. “We wanted X9 to be cut up into four or five zones, to be able to achieve as much herd-by-herd management as possible. But we had to settle for one new zone. We’ve still got a long way to go. I went out and hunted briefly late one afternoon near Bridgeport, got on top of a hill and saw a dozen or so does running with three spike bucks. It just made me sick.”

A spike buck is a yearling, a buck that would not be of breeding age if older bucks were around.

Said Ron Thomas, the DFG biologist: “You don’t know what’s happening when you see spike bucks with does. It might be spike bucks breeding with their mothers or sisters. Healthy deer herds are ones where the biggest, strongest, most dominant bucks do the breeding. When you see a spike buck breeding with a doe, there is no way to know what genetic characteristics are being passed along.”

A surprising number of hunters favor shutting down the Eastern Sierra for a few seasons, allowing the herds to build up to healthier numbers, then resuming hunts.

“They ought to shut it down completely for two or three years, and bring the herds back to what they were,” said Kuflak.

Thomas disagreed. “I don’t think that’s called for in this case,” he said. “Really, all you do when you shut down a deer season entirely is raise semi-tame bucks who’ve never been hunted. So when you have that first season on them, a high percentage of the mature bucks are killed right off and you’re right back where you started. Biologically, you haven’t accomplished much.

“Another frequent suggestion is to have a three-point-only hunt. That doesn’t always work, either. What you get instead is a lot of forked horns taken by mistake.

“My preference would be to tighten up the hunt. We’re getting earlier, harder winters up here--I’d like to see the season moved up a week earlier, and shortened one week. In fact, I will recommend the DFG ask the commission to do just that for next year.”

Many Eastern Sierra people believe that the state of the East Walker and West Walker deer herds are partly attributable to the early winter of 1981. A days-long, heavy snowstorm hit the northern parts of the Eastern Sierra that fall, just as deer season began. The storm drove unprecedented numbers of mature bucks down from the high country to lower elevations, where many were shot by hunters.

Rockel said: “A lot of guys got trophy bucks that year, but I really believe we’re still paying the price for that ’81 storm. There were so many older bucks taken, it had to have an impact on the gene pool of the herds.”

There was more of the same this season. A heavy snowfall occurred in northern Mono County, where more than a foot of snow fell at 5,500-foot elevations.

“That chased a lot of big bucks down out of the high country, and they took a real pounding,” Thomas said.

Rockel, Thomas and other hunters fear a major winter could kill many deer in the region known as the Sherwin Bowl, near Bishop. It’s at the upper end of the Owens Valley, below and west of the Sherwin Grade on 395. At roughly 4,000 feet elevation, it is winter range for up to 4,000 deer from the Sherwin Grade and Casa Diablo herds.

“When we get an exceptionally heavy winter, an awful lot of deer are going to die in the Sherwin Bowl,” Thomas said. “The browse is in poor shape to begin with there, and a lot of snowfall would bury it.

“The bitterbrush (a prime winter deer food source) is not in good shape. It’s been heavily browsed. There are a lot of rodents, and we’ve had a lot of dry years. If we get some funding, we may be able to do some bitterbrush rejuvenation in there, maybe even irrigate it.”

Deer management in California is often a three-pronged battle among hunters, politicians and bureaucrats. Acrimony is the common tone, compromise the most frequent result, deer the most frequent losers.

Rockel said: “In my opinion, if three things were to happen, we’d have very little to worry about with our deer herds--allowing the DFG to schedule doe hunts when it’s biologically sound to do so, make all antlered deer legal, including spikes, and to repeal the Bush Bill.”

The Bush Bill is a state law passed in the late 1950s that awarded veto power to boards of supervisors of 25 counties, Inyo and Mono among them, over special deer hunts enacted by the Fish and Game Commission.

Rockel said: “We really need to return management of our deer herds completely to the DFG. That’s where the expertise is.” Bob Tanner, who owns Red’s Meadow Pack Station in Mammoth Lakes and who has packed deer hunters into the Sierra back country since the 1950s, blames the Fish and Game Commission for the Eastern Sierra’s depressed deer herds.

“We (the Eastern Sierra Packers Assn.) have been asking the commission for years to move the season up earlier and to shorten it. The DFG has been asking the commission for the same thing. They refuse to do it, the deer keep getting in worse shape and the commissioners can’t understand why.”

Tanner also said that the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management need to alter present lease grazing practices in deer winter range area.

“It’s not just the Sherwin Bowl area,” he said. “deer winter range is in poor shape in a lot of areas, and a big reason is because it’s been too heavily used by sheep and cattle.”