THE OUTDOORS : Now, Bambi Has a Beeper : DFG Puts Radio Collars on Two Dozen Deer to Keep Track of Their Wandering and Help Protect Herd’s Grazing Areas

Mist rises off the frosty dirt road. Two of California’s magnificent mountains--Shasta in front, Lassen over the left shoulder--are snowy brilliant in the morning light as the small caravan winds its way uphill.

Ahead, two deer spring from the brush and quickly vanish down the slope. Where did they come from? Where are they going?

Those are questions Dave Smith may be able to answer within a couple of months after attaching radio transmitting collars to 24 does from the West Lassen herd recently.

Deer are wearing beepers now.

“Bambi, call your office.”

Except these work in reverse, each sending a constant, distinctive signal out five or six miles to be monitored in June, when Smith, a State Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist, flies over the area.

“This is a winter range,” Smith said, standing in a clearing in the Cinder Cone area of east Shasta County at the southern end of the Cascade Range. “In three or four weeks, they’ll migrate to their summer ranges. There is some indication that they come to this winter range in poor condition, so we need to find out where they’re spending their summer.”

For that matter, the winter range does not provide a bountiful buffet for the deer.

“This is horrible forage,” Smith said. “Look around under any juniper tree and you’ll see a high line (where the deer have eaten as high as they can stretch). These browse plants, (which are) important deer food plants, have been browsed down to nothing. The area is tremendously overgrazed by both deer and livestock.”

There is too little food for too many deer, and the solutions are basic.

“We can look at ways to improve the habitat,” Smith said, “or regulate the size of the herd (by) controlled hunting.”

A combination may be ideal, and such a program has a name: wildlife management.

But any program that involves the killing of nature’s gentle creatures will draw criticism, even though professionals such as Smith insist that allowing a few to be killed will prevent many more from starving to death.

Smith says the Cow Creek herd of Shasta County is an example of what can happen when a herd is left alone. He claims nearly half of the adult does--about 3,000--and thousands of fawns perished in 1987, reducing the population by about 40%. Most of the victims were those too young or old to compete for food, including one doe whose worn-down teeth indicated she was 18 years old, about 10 years past her prime for reproduction.

“It proves you can’t stockpile deer,” Smith said. “The old ones just tend to take up space, and when you get adverse conditions like a drought, those deer die like flies.”

But public sentiment seems to have a knee-jerk reaction against doe hunts.

“Some object to it from an emotional point of view, and that’s understandable to me,” Smith said. “Some object to it from a misunderstanding about biological facts. They think that because of shooting does, the population will be depleted because they’re the ones that have the babies. It’s not that simple.”

Smith supports his case with statistics from the Cow Creek case.

“Before that die-off, we had about 6,000 does bringing only about 20 fawns per 100 adult does to adulthood,” he said. “They were raising 1,200 fawns, 600 of which were bucks.

“If we assume the worst--that 3,000 does died--we now have 3,000 (younger) does left out there that are providing at least 50 fawns per 100 does, or 1,500 deer--750 of them bucks.”

The difference, the DFG said in a press release on the issue, was that “Hunters could have helped to achieve the same thing through antlerless (doe) hunting, taking home venison that (instead) ended up decaying on the forest floor. . . . “

Still, such views clash with the emotions of some Northern Californians who remember when the DFG in 1956 permitted an either-sex deer hunt that happened to coincide with storms that drove thousands of does down from the high country and into the open for what even the hunters called a slaughter.

“But four years later we had one of the biggest buck (hunting) kills on record,” said Paul Wertz, the information officer for the DFG’s Region 1 office at Redding.

Providing extra food for the deer doesn’t seem to work. Grant Jense, assistant chief of game management for Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources, says: “It’s just not good game management to feed deer and elk. We know from experience that feeding creates more problems than it solves.”

When deer gather at emergency feeding stations, Jense says, they are subject to disease, harassment by dogs and other stress.

“And even though the deer ate the pellets we fed in 1983-84,” he adds, “many of them died during the transition back to natural forage in the spring.”

Wertz fears that the nearby East Lassen herd is headed for what happened to the Cow Creek herd.

“We can see it coming,” he said, “but the public sentiment is so much against doe hunting that we have to sit there and watch it crash.”

Overpopulation in a limited habitat isn’t the West Lassen herd’s only problem. Because the hunt periods for various zones are staggered throughout the state, some deer may be exposed to double jeopardy.

“We think some of these deer may be coming from other hunting zones,” Smith said. “They might get hunted there and come in here and get hunted again.”

So, he collars a few to track their migrations.

Only does are collared. The two-inch wide plastic collars might strangle bucks when their necks swell during the rutting (mating) season, or the collars might get tangled in another buck’s horns when they battle over the does.

Any bucks captured get just an ear tag and a blood test, and someday a successful hunter may turn in the tag.

“Where the buck was taken tells us something, too,” Smith said.

Smith and a crew of about two dozen from the DFG, U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management capture the deer by herding them into nets with a helicopter.

The eight-foot high, wide-meshed nets are strung up in an H-shape, each leg about 100 yards long. Everybody hunkers down behind rocks and trees while pilot Steve DeJesus scours the surrounding forest for deer, and when he locates a few he works them into the clearing like a cowboy riding a quarter horse.

Soon, DeJesus drops down low and swings the chopper left and right, cutting off the deer’s escape and routing them to the clearing. Suddenly, four deer burst into sight, running toward the nets.

When they can run no farther, they collapse tangled in the nets or run around in circles in panic as the workers leap to their feet and wrestle them to the ground.

One gets away. A buck is tagged and released. The two remaining does are hobbled with leather straps, blood-tested and fitted with radio collars. The process takes about 15 minutes, then they’re turned loose and are still running when they disappear into the trees. They never look back.

Smith conceded that the system isn’t perfect. Occasionally, an animal dies.

“There’s always a certain amount of stress,” Smith said. “These deer are deficient in selenium, and when you stress them, the deficiency reduces their ability to deal with that stress. One of the things we’ve done here is give them selenium injections to combat that.

“With all kinds of trapping operations (mortality) averages about 5%. But with this kind of a net operation system in a nice open grassy area, we rarely lose one.”

Before the technique of driving deer into nets with helicopters was developed in Montana and New Mexico, DFG personnel tried other, less successful methods.

“This is the best technique when you need a large number of animals quickly,” Smith said.

This day the tagging is successful and no deer are lost. Smith awards high marks to DeJesus, who on one run herded about 15 deer into the nets.

Later, the deer are so spooked that DeJesus can’t drive even one into the clearing before he has to leave to refuel.

“The deer have to win sometime,” Wertz said.