There have been surveys throughout my career as a wildlife biologist, now repeated every year or two, some university does it, and a lot of times they ask questions about what's the most enjoyable factor or determinants of the hunt. And almost always, without a doubt, state by state, university by university, safety is a number factor. It always comes up. It's not large enough and it usually goes in this order: safety and then seeing the wildlife and spending time with the family and friends and the camaraderie, and somewhere way down the list is to harvest or the opportunity to harvest. Usually, and this is very important, the opportunity to harvest wildlife outscores or is a strong determinant of satisfaction than the actual harvest.
Just been able to participate nature in the hope that you're going to have a successful hunt is more important than having a successful hunt. I think that speaks a lot about why do people hunt? It's that chase, it's being involved with wildlife and interacting with nature, sharing it with your friends and the camaraderie. When they go from the cave paintings to-- everyone taking their video camera out in the woods now. It's all about sharing their hunt, sharing the story.
The role of hunting is more critical to society as a whole now than it even has been. We can look at this from several angles. We have areas in the north-east where the deers are grossly over-populated and deer car accidents are a major concern. Unfortunately there is death involved with this and a large toll of human death. Hunters can play a role in society where they go into these communities where it's safe to have archery hunts or other mechanism and reduce deer density, reduce the number of deer that might care -- and reduce the deer car accidents in neighborhoods and play a real valuable role for the society.
Also the $100, nothing has done more to conserve wild lands. Habitat America then $100, that's the most important thing we have. What we did right was set aside land to be in a natural state to be preserved for all of us to enjoy, whether it's through hunting or non-hunting activities. Hunters are playing a critical role for society and we need to paint that in a good light and publicize that more and please their own rings and take care of those who are not acting as sportsmen in a way. We need to take care of that from within our own rings.
I think the recent trends we are seeing in management is very positive. I think a lot of people are buying a little agriculture land somewhere so they can have their own place and take their family and be safe about the hunts and feel comfortable who's hunting where and enjoy the camaraderie. And they want to put the deer. They are planning more for deer. They are maintaining their timber more for deer to maximum timber value and I think that's all very healthy for wildlife.
We know that a balanced deer herd is not too many deer, but a balanced deer herd won't over-browse the habitat and allows us to have more nesting areas for birds, and the ground based animals. There's 27 species of songbirds and we've read now that nesting four to five feet and if we have too many deers and they browse on the leaves there is no nest habitat for those songbirds. So I think a good healthy deer management program is extremely healthy for all of nature, all of wildlife.
I think there are some cases out there where deer management has went beyond just to help with deer herd, it's solely about going to biggest land where you can. And I'm not sure that attitude is healthy for the longevity of hunting and maybe even for wildlife. I'm very much for a healthy deer herd. Antlers, their number of fawns and body weights are all indicators of a healthy deer herd. Don't get me wrong. I use them all the time in my work.
But you have got to be careful when you do everything you can. Some people are using steroids or whatever, everything they possibly can just to go to biggest set of antlers. I'm not for that. I'm for a healthy overall deer heard and a healthy habitat, and if you have that, you're going to have large mature bucks.
I've been fascinated with deer my whole life. I'd never wanted to be anything but a deer biologist. What I get to do now is a dream for me. Then I started going to different colleges and learned about management. Sex ratios, and age structures, what really came home to me was, I read some books about the early explorers and botanists basically that the kings of foreign countries England and Spain and Central America say, is this worth going to war over? And in their notes they talked about seeing white tail deer that has many bucks, as I did those and I took the research little further and looked at middens which were the Indians taking the refuge around camps and they found over 10,000 pelvic girdles of deer throughout America, North Dakota, Mississippi, I have known the Mississippi river in the south.
Pelvic girdle, you can age a deer pretty accurately by the pelvic girdle, and you sex it real accurately. So before white men got here with bows that weren't real accurate and people were hungry just trying to get in there and eat anything they could just to survive and make tools out of and clothing. They had a balanced harvest. They killed as many bucks as they did those. And almost 50% of the bucks with three-and-a-half years old and older. That's what clicked me about deer management. This is what gotten them in the deer herd to be. This is what was here before we set rules and regulation and did it all.
And Quality Deer Management as we term it, it could be in terms of a lot of things. The term Quality Deer Management kind of stuck with it, is making a natural sex ratio and age structure. The same numbers of bucks, there's -- that kind of makes sense as biologists come out about 50:50 and you would expect them to go through life about same mortality and get to add older age structure and older aged bucks have different effects on the the breeding behavior. The social cycles of deer herd, that's what coming together for me is what was here before white men got here and put regulation on it.
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