Modern Wild Faunal Resource System Management
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By Robert H. Giles, Jr. Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061
Based on a presentation to the annual meeting of the Virginia chapter of the Izaac Walton league of America, Natural Bridge, VA) Oct. 10, 1980. also Shawnee Hunt Club, Radford (Cris')) Dec. 6, 1980.
You've heard of the farmer who entered his mule in the Kentucky derby? He said "Yes, I know it didn't stand a chance but I thought the association would be good for it." The planners of your conference surely must have thought the association with you would be good for me.
I'm very pleased [my wife] could join me here. I'm sure that the association will do [her] good too.
She cut down on smoking. She's down to 6 cigarettes per day, one after each meal. The other day I was cutting grass. I had been working in the basement before that and was very grubby. A lady in a very big car drove up and asked "how much do you get for mowing lawns?" No set price I said, but the lady inside lets me sleep with her!". She drove off.
We lived in idaho for 4 years.
Elk hunting was popular. A woman I heard of trying very hrad to learn good hunter behavior. She had new duds, a new rifle, and had practiced...just like you recommend. We separated and I went up one side of a ridge and she the other. I heard shots and hurried to help her . I crossed the ridge and there she was with the rifle pointed at a man bent over and she wal yelling "That's my elk; that's my elk!"
"Yes mam" I heard him say, "You can have it just as soon as i get my saddle off it."
Let me talk to you about wildlife, not those elk, but the while-tailed deer and some others. These will not be bed-time stories or end-of-the-day easies but a very special way of looking at animals.
It is important to learn to see wildlife in this way but, more importantly, wildlife can help us see ourselves more clearly and provide solutions to a set of major modern problems.
Much of what I'll talk about is in a book called wildlife ecology by Moen 1973. Some is in my wildlife management 1978 (both by Freeman co.) The basic idea is that animals are:
The basic problem as we now see it is that (1) everything costs energy and (2) energy is in relatively short supply.
I'll not go into debates over coal reserves) whether energy is really in short supply) or whether fossil fuels will run out in 50 or 500 years. My personal analysis of the situation is that because of some energy related problems my personal quality of life has begun to slip. I'm convinced that readily available high quality coal is difficult to produce, that mining is a hell of a way to make a living, that strip mining does some awful things to people and. water supplies and land in southwestern Virginia, and in general I don't like being completely dependent on anyone for anything important
I think my daughters' families will one day fight - risk their lives in wars for oil - it will be that precious to them and their country.All of that adds up to my bias that i have an energy problem of great magnitude.
Before going further) here is a refresher from 8th grade biology and chemistry courses. This a box of crackers.(Holding up Triscits) It has 1500 k cal. That is about 6000 btu. Thee energy in this box will raise the temperature of 17 gals.of water 1 degree Farenheit. This is a cubic centimeter. that glass of ice water on the table in front of you has about 100 cc of water.
It took 5000 k cal to produce the ice water. The droplets on the outside of the glass weigh about 1/2 gram. It loses 300 cal in changing that from water to vapor. That's why dogs pant and why you feel cool after splashing warm water in your face and getting out of the shower.
That cup of coffee at the beginning of the meal cost 100 kwh. it takes 440 tons of coal to produce the electricity just for our annual coffee. That coal is being strip mined which without your new laws would be damaging fish and wildlife.
I'm up here pumping off 250 k cal of energy in this speech. You sitting there on your. . . chairs) not doing a d--- thing and you're pumping off 75 k cal of energy. We're just beginning to think about energy and energy costs. Energy costs are hidden and poorly accounted, farm products are subsidized so market prices do not reflect energy costs.
International markets rarely reflect energy costs well,
Laws on trade and interstate transportation drastically skew the costs.
There has been no need to think energy but now we must. Wildlife have been doing .it a long time. In fact they are nearly perfect energy budgeters.
The old laws of "Survival of the Fittest" can be translated into "survival of the good budgeter.".Tto be fit is to be able to make energy intake equal to the energy costs of living.
A deer weighs 110 pounds. (Yes, I know, yours weighed 300 pounds:) I'm talking about an average doe, healthy, good to eat, beautiful to see, (not tough like your old buck.) Every move, every blink, every shake of ear or tail cost it energy. It costs more to move up hill than on flat land. Every day on the average it needs to take in 1500 k cal of energy. it takes 1400 in winter (they turn down their thermostats.)
The trouble with a simple statement like that is that it is always wrong. We're grasping for big handles.The reasons it is wrong is that
If there is abundant body fat or food on the other side of the river the deer can laugh at the dog for the deer is very buoyant, very strong, very well insulated - but on another day - relative to wind, temperature, stored energy in fat, or available food - that swim may be its last.
It is all very complicated - delightfully so - and it all is beginning to make more and more sense. Let's talk about food and cover.
When was a kid I didn't ,have much money and it came from lots of places - paper routes, allowance, gifts etc. I didn't care where it came from - it went into one meager pot from which I spent it hoarding it, rubbing each nickel, before I spent it. Deer are the same I've come to realize. They get energy from many sources -- some from fruits, some from bushes, some from mushrooms, some from grass and weeds. (some from insects and fish - but not much.)
Some they get from radiant energy - from sun and from energy absorbed by plants during the day and given off at night. (Have you ever noticed how warm it seems in a hemlock grove at night compared to outside it? The hemlocks are re-radiating energy.)
Energy is always being lost. You can't create it or destroy it, says the first law, and the second law is you can't keep it. So in winter a deer (or you and I) are continually "firing the boiler" continually taking on energy to fire the life processes. Some we store as fat - you've all seen it as suet around a deer's kidney.
You know why birds go for it at your feeder.
Some energy is in a layer under the skin. That layer under the skin makes it smooth, and round, . . . and soft. .. and curvaceous and exceedingly sensuous ... sorry,… I've lost my chain of thought there. You know ERA is a movement to eliminate discrimination on the basis of the shape of a person's skin.
You'll have to forgive my fantasy and forgetfullness. It seems hereditary - my grandfather was still chasing women at age 80 - but he sometimes forgot why he was chasing them.
Well we have to get back to the topic - that fantastic insulation, that beautiful layer of fat. It is used up as an animal goes through the winter and there the problems arise for
They survive because they are good energy budgeters. The new meaning of the survival of the fittest is the survival of the energy budgeter.
An animal is cold. It sees food on both sides of it. It costs energy to move. Acorns have 1500 kilo calories per pound of food. W illow browse (bushes) has 680 kilo calories per pound. It costs energy to get energy. The idea is to get profit, to get net energy. The surviving deer is one that gets more than it costs to geit, (there I am back at my fantasy).
The new law of life is "get the net."
The animal will go for acorns. Suppose there are no acorns and the animal must choose between willows on the stream bank and dogwood on the clearcut bank. There is the same amount of digestible energy in each but the amount of stuff that must be processed costs 20% more for dogwood than for willows. By processed i mean chewed (high energy cost), swallowed (a cost), digested in 4 stomachs, and absorbed (a cost), and excreted (a direct lost). They eat willow.Out west they eat willows. Up north they eat white cedar.
Rabbits eat their own feces as if to say "you little kilo calorie, you'll not get away that easily.
I've already used a lot of energy finding you, risking my tail to go out from cover to collect you, chewed you up for hours, and heaven only knows what happened after I swallowed you, and now you look like an alfalfa pellet processed by some farmer who doesn't comprehend the energy problem This is too good. Down the hatch. "
Back to our deer. It's eating food at great cost, not just getting it but processing it. Then along comes some swollen-neck, rutty buck, impregnates her at relatively high cost, and 7 months later she looses much energy, in gestation, the fawn. Pretty little thing ...but a direct energy cost (or loss) and then she starts lactating, Giving milk is an awful drain. at 500 k cal/day (equivalent to 10 boxes of triscuits). Do you see what's happening? we can think acorns and milk. we can start equating - hell - that deer has to process + three pounds of acorns to feed that dear little thing day to day.
Now a doe deer about to drop a fawn and start lactation is in a very precarious position. Bred in Sept, Oct., moving through the winter with that little bambi consuming her energy reserves for producing hide, hair, bones, etc. - taking it all from her uterus.
Fortunately birth takes place at the flush of vegetation - when energy is captured and there is abundant energy in the succulent green of spring time. This is a harsh, double play of nature. It takes back what given for all of that energy must be processed before it can be made into milk.
Chewing, and chewing, and chewing - and no real gains because that fawn is taking it all. A late spring flush of vegetation can "do in", greatly reduce a population for several years.
The fawn will take the last energy of the doe; both may die, not winter, but spring is the critical season, but all are related. How can a deer prepare for the spring? It seeks out quality habitat - in short supply:
Food is cover when viewed as energy you thought "a penny saved is a penny earned" was a quaint old saying.The deer has operated for ages on "a kcal saved is a kcal earned."
How can people prepare for the energy-short period? They do it by
I personally would love to continue to discuss this topic but some clearly do not share my enthusiasm for it.
I'm convinced we are in for some very bad times ahead as compared to the past. They will be good; I'm not despondent.The cave people had good times I'm sure. Energy is a way to a full life, an ability to respond to emergencies, to seize opportunity. It's in short supply; it will get shorter. We need to become energy budgeters. We might "look to hills from whence cometh our help." Some may find it from the land, some may find it, second hand from our energetically efficient wildlife who may teach us all we need to know about surviving as humans, not animals, in an energy-limited world.
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Last revision January 18, 2004.