I hunted Unit 45 w/muzzy a couple of years ago now and we saw Elk nearly every day....in country and a cover type which I had never felt was good elk habitat. Largely just sagebrush flats with limited brush. I thought then that if the ID G&F didn't start clipping the elk herd that the deer pop. would decline.....as it has everywhere I have hunted where elk numbers ballooned.
I posted a while back on the apparent inverse relationship between elk and deer so I hope this isn't a repeat for those reading it. I was involved in range management for years and if a rancher wished to figure out how many cattle he could run on sheep range, the "rule-of-thumb" conversion was 7 sheep AUMs (animal unit month) for every 1 cattle AUM.
A sheep AUM is 1 ewe and 2 lambs. A cattle AUM is one cow and one calf. This conversion depends, of course, on the range condition and type because sheep and cattle prefer different forage and browse species but, in general, the math would work out as follows:
For every cattle AUM (2 cattle) the range would support about 7 sheep AUMS (21 sheep). (Roughly, a ratio of 1 cow to 10 sheep.)
Because I have watched deer numbers plummet in so many areas in Montana, Colorado, Idaho, Washington and Wyoming (I have lived and hunted each each of these states) when elk numbers increase even modestly, I believe that a similar number relationship/ratio exists between elk and deer as exists between cattle and sheep. In other words, for every additional elk in the habitat, the number of deer is going to drop by up to 10.
I think this occurs because when an elk and a deer is looking for forage during the critical late winter period, the elk is going to get the bite and the deer is going to go hungry...just a simple function of size/dominance.
When I was a kid, the area south of Lewiston, Idaho, the "breaks" off the prairie down into the Snake River had so many deer every draw in every canyon was a delight to hunt. It was normal to hunt around through the draws and canyons on foot for a day and tally upwards of 40 to 60 deer. There were no elk in the area back then. Today, this area supports a very healthy elk herd but the deer pop is nowhere near where it was BE (before elk) despite years of limited quota hunting for deer.
So lets do the math. The IDF&G estimates that there is about 1300 elk in the unit. This means that 13,000 deer are going missing simply because the habitat can no longer support them from an ecological and social basis.
My grandson hunted for the first time this year. His father came down with a serious illness this year and was unable to take his son hunting...so....to my delight I had the pleasure of stepping in and doing the honors. I live in Northern Idaho. My grandson lives in Southern Idaho so I needed to find an area near Boise to take him. I scouted and found some really great looking walk-in habitat. Great water, great forage, great hiding cover. Just great looking mule deer habitat. However, I was going in blind as I had not hunted the area. We hunted three days and did not see a single deer. I couldn't believe my eyes. It wasn't that we weren't seeing them. There were just so little sign that I the numbers of resident deer is just very, very low. We did see a few elk though and.....we saw lots of evidence that many elk winter in the area. In my opinion, the lack of resident deer in this area is because the area is heavily used by elk during the winter. I talked to a third generation rancher in the area who is in his late 60's. He told me that when he was growing up deer were like rabbits in the area and there were no elk on the mountain. Now, they see several hundred elk on their ranch during the winter and very little deer. So....there you have it.
I moved to another spot that I was more familiar with....the Salmon River Breaks....and my grandson harvested his first deer...a whitetail doe...at 130 yds (.243 w/bipod). Great fun!
