| Popis: |
White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) have adapted to, and are thriving in, residential–suburban landscapes. Special hunts, sharpshooting programs, and fertility control efforts have been implemented in residential communities to reduce local deer populations. For these management strategies to be effective, it is important to understand deer movement and behavior patterns in suburban landscapes. Our objectives were to quantify annual and hunt-season home-range size, and evaluate the relationships between landscape characteristics, land-ownership patterns, and deer movements during the autumn hunting season. Much variation in home range size was observed for annual (15.5–173 ha) and hunt-season home range (16.8–120.7 ha) over the 2-yr study. Deer core areas were not characteristically different from home ranges with regards to forest lands or building density, but were different with regards to road density and property density. Deer use of core areas during the day was similar to, or higher than, deer use at night. Most individual properties in deer core areas were |
