COUNTYWIDE : Deer Study to Help Land-Use Planners

County environmental planners say they are seizing an opportunity to find out more about the habits of thousands of deer that live, breed and feed in the Santa Ana Mountains and the foothills of southeastern Orange County.

What they learn in a two-year study of the herds of California mule deer could well play a part in future land-use planning decisions about the foothills--a buffer area between civilization and one of wildlife’s last refuges in the Cleveland National Forest.

The proposed study could also influence planning decisions for the 30-mile-long Foothill Transportation Corridor, the future site of a planned toll road that would connect Interstate 5 at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County with a north-south leg of the Eastern Transportation Corridor.

“We are trying to take advantage of a good situation,” said Gary Medeiros, an environmental planner for the county’s Environmental Management Agency.

Medeiros said his agency will ask the Board of Supervisors for $63,600 Tuesday so the county can expand on another study already under way to determine what, if any, effects the Eastern Transportation Corridor in the northern part of the county would have on deer living and feeding there. That study will cost $135,000, including $35,000 for a helicopter that would chase the deer into a net. .

“I think it is beautiful that the county is asking for the expanded study,” said Esther Burkett, a state Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist. “It was something that they were not required to do. This is how it should work.”

EMA officials said that a deer study for the southern part of the county is important because the county’s general land-use plan specifically calls for the preservation of natural resources, including deer herds and other wildlife.

“We have to know what their (deer) needs are,” Medeiros said. “We don’t really know how much deer habitat is out there. As far as I know, no other study like this has been done before in the southern part of the county.”

If the study is approved, Fish and Game officials would capture another 20 mule deer, take blood tests, tag them and put electronic collars on the animals, then turn them loose. Officials would track them for two years in hopes of answering questions about their movements.

The first deer study got under way in late January when Fish and Game officials captured 30 deer and immediately returned them to the wild after installing radio transmitting collars. Tracking of those deer will begin shortly. The study included deer herds in Weir, Gypsum, Coal and Blind canyons. It is supposed to determine whether the deer can live with the proposed 23-mile toll road that would bisect the Santa Ana Mountains to connect the Riverside Freeway with Interstate 5.

“Deer are stuck on the land, unlike eagles that can fly away,” Burkett said. When a new highway or a development is built, it usually deprives wildlife of something they need.

“That is what we have to determine in studies like this. What do the deer and the eagles and the wildlife need.”