Hogs will devour anything they can fit in their mouth, plant or animal, including bird eggs, baby birds, raccoons, and opossum. Now in the case of hogs, which are not a native species to the Americas (and which we can think the Spanish for releasing en masse in the 1500s), they have taken over virtually all of the American South. If we don’t cull the herds, species that also rely on the deer’s favorite foods are lost, sometimes forever. Deer are eating everything in reach and that destructive appetite reduces the habitat for songbirds that are really suffering around the nation (apparently even the Audubon Society is pro-deer culling in response to declining bird populations). Sometimes you see a straight vegetation-free line when looking in the forest and that’s caused by deer. We have created a perfect living situation for deer with agriculture and open grazing areas where they thrive.Īs Bruce explained, it is incumbent for us to regulate these herds to maintain a balanced ecosystem similar to that prior to settlement. When the first white settlers arrived, there were around one million whitetail deer in North America and now we have that many in South Carolina alone. Early European settlers to North America took out big predators like panthers and red wolves in the South, so the deer herds really took off. A bit of historyīruce Lampright, Naturalist at Brays Island in South Carolina explained to me that a well-managed deer herd is a key asset to a healthy ecosystem. It wasn’t until I moved back down South that I started to understand the environmental case for hunting, specifically deer and hogs. That didn’t go over too well.īack in 2012, in the name of fashion, I did go on a stag hunt in Scotland and shot a mighty buck we named Clovis who later became a leather bag. As a matter of fact when my dad would take me quail hunting as a kid, I would run out into the field and try to rescue any that still seemed to be alive.

Deer Hunting Usa Arcade Manual