A history of deer management on the Island of Mount Desert, Maine
Smith E, Phillips C, Hart A. 2014. A history of deer management on the Island of Mount Desert, Maine. College of the Atlantic. Bar Harbor, ME
From the introduction: "As long as humans have inhabited Mount Desert Island there have been white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus). Archaeological evidence has revealed that deer were present on or in the vicinity of Mount Desert Island (MDI) prior to the arrival of Europeans in North America (Stitt 1965). Both deer and humans have had to adapt to each other throughout history, though the deer have had to adapt to a landscape radically altered by humans. A lot about MDI has changed in the past 150 years: by 1870, decades after people began coming to the island in earnest, most of the island’s first-growth forest was gone (Sterba 2012). Those who settled Mount Desert Island created a landscape of small farms and industries much like the rest of New England. 47% of the island’s acreage was classified as “improved” in government records, meaning it had been put to human use and not left as forest (Sterba 2012). In many ways, this creation of a landscape of “edges” (transition zones between different landscape features) was the beginning of a long history of human-deer interaction, as the “improvements” humans made to the land created ideal habitat for deer."
- Type
- Unpublished Report
- Authors
- Smith, Erickson; Phillips, Christopher; Hart, Anneke
- Date of Issue
- 2014
- Publisher
- College of the Atlantic
- Units
- ACAD
- Keywords
- Carrying Capacity, Conservation, Forest, hunting, Interaction, natural resource management, overpopulation, Poaching, Population, population control, Rangers