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FROM Ian Nance, TheLedger.com
April 1, 2022
The belief that bucks in some Florida regions grew bigger than elsewhere due to restocking with deer from Wisconsin and Texas leans towards fantasy.
Chuck was the cowboy on the Manatee County property I hunted in the
late-1990s and early-2000s, and he bagged big bucks from season to season.
Spending the time he did onsite, Chuck developed the institutional knowledge
required to consistently harvest these deer and drew the awe and curiosity
from a young fella eager himself for trophy antlers.
Chuck believed that the bucks in that region of Florida grew bigger than
elsewhere due to restocking programs with deer from Wisconsin and Texas a
generation prior. And if you’ve hunted deer in this state for long enough,
it’s likely you’ve heard similar tales. The restocking aspect of this belief
is true; how much those efforts resulted in larger deer leans more towards
the fantasy realm.
Let me explain.
As with whitetail populations across the United States, Florida’s deer
numbers were cratering in the early 1900s. Railways and roads opened up the
countryside to unregulated hunting for commercial purposes and subsistence
for large work crews. Game laws and responsible wildlife husbandry were
still in the larval stages. Habitat loss and competition with domestic
animals further suppressed their numbers. And, state ranchers, eager to
prevent the tick-borne Texas Cattle Fever from spreading, destroyed
thousands of deer who were thought to host the arachnids.
According to FWC, the tide shifted in 1941 when the Florida legislature
voted to participate in the Pittman-Robertson (P-R) Act of 1937. This
monumental legislation procured federal funding for state wildlife
management. With this new revenue stream, one of Florida’s first projects
was to restock its ravaged whitetail population with animals from elsewhere
in the nation.
Curious about these claims of enhanced deer genetics through imported
animals and where they actually came from, I asked Lindsay Thomas Jr., the
Chief Communications Officer for the National Deer Association, for input.
He responded with pages from a book, now out of publication, titled, “A
History of White-Tailed Deer Restocking in the United States: 1878 to 2004”
authored by J. Scott McDonald and Karl V. Miller.
According to this book, over the course of nearly four decades 1,513 deer
were imported into the state while 1,409 were moved from one part of Florida
to another. As for the non-resident transplants, in 1941 the first deer from
Bull’s Island, South Carolina, were turned loose to fend for themselves in
the Florida wilds; from 1949 through 1950, Wisconsin deer were introduced;
Texas provided to the cause from 1949 through 1969; and in the 1960s,
Louisiana deer were released. Contributions were also made periodically from
Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina.
Going back to my old friend Chuck, between 1949 and 1950, 313 bucks and 398
does from Texas and Wisconsin were released in 28 counties, including
Manatee and nearby Polk, Hardee, and Sarasota counties, according to the
book. Yes, there were indeed Badger State and Lone Star State whitetails
roaming the Sunshine State scrubs and swamps once upon a time.
But, did this simple fact alone contribute to bigger bucks today?
Well, not really. Neither the math nor the genetics really works out, but
that’s a complicated topic that we’ll save until next week. However, while
it’s improbable that these restocking efforts contributed to larger antlers
for our deer, it’s quite possible it had an effect on another critical
aspect of Florida’s deer hunting that continues to astound and bewilder
hunters and game managers alike: the timing of the rut.
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