Syracuse.com - Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge staff are "spot-lighting" deer

[HuntingNY-News]

They work from a truck and they don't carry a firearm. The goal is to count.

Staff at the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge are “spot-lighting” deer.

For the second straight year, wildlife biologists Scott Stipetich and Linda Ziemba are going out at night with a “three million candlewatt” flashlight. They work from a truck and they don't carry a firearm. The goal is to count.

"Our objective is to try and figure out how many deer are in each group, the distance they are from our driving roads, measure that distance and apply some statistics to that,” Stipetich said. “The result is not an actual population size, it’s an index (an estimate) of how many deer are here.”

The 9,000-acre refuge contains about 7,000 acres of marshy land, he said. Looking out into the refuge’s main pool, for example, Stipetich said he knows there’s deer out there, but because of obvious logistics it’d be hard to accurately count them.

Stipetich said he and Ziemba have gone out twice already and will continue until the opening of the firearms hunting season, Nov. 17.

Last year’s estimate, he said, was around 20 deer per square mile. Is that too many?

“There’s no number that tells you how many deer should be per square mile. It all depends on what the habitat can support," he said.

Stipetich added that the spot-lighting survey is being conducted along with a “deer browse” survey on vegetation at the refuge.

“We’re seeing that a lot of the vegetation is getting hammered pretty hard,” he said. “We’re just trying to get a baseline of information to figure out if we should be taking more deer off the land, or not."

Deer hunting is permitted on most of the refuge's land. The archery season begins this Thursday and the firearms season coincides with the Southern Zone's schedule (Nov. 17).

A maximum of 300 bowhunters are allowed on the refuge each day, and no more than 150 hunters during the firearms season. There's no fee. Hunters must get a "self-service permit" each day from the refuge's check station on Route 89. For more information, call 568-5987.

The biggest deer seen so far?

"We saw it just last night. It was a 10-pointer -- a giant," he said.

View the full article on The Syracuse Outdoors Blog