Keeping tabs on White-Tailed Deer

December 11, 2012, 9:00 pm by Lyn Odom

Understanding how Texas Parks and Wildlife, or TPWD, keeps track of   White-Tailed deer populations is a complex consortium of factors that once tabulated, comes down to what TPWD calls "units.”

"Deer populations may be similar across counties,” said Alan Cain, who heads up TPWD White-Tail deer program. "That is why we don¹t have data specific to one area… there are no county boundaries.”

Cain said if you are looking at numbers, biologists are recording what’s referred to as a  Resource Management Unit, or RMU, that includes calculations of the animals’ age, quality, body density, body weight and more.

"Units are also based on the geographic area ­ or ecoregions,” Cain said. "Habitat features such as rainfall, land use, practices, soil and plant communities all mean something when it comes to calculating populations per unit.”

Included in RMU 6 are Llano, Mason, and portions of San Saba, McCulloch, Gillespie, Menard, Blanco and Burnet counties. RMU 6 consists of 583,685 acres.

According to the Federal Aid report Cain submits each year with information about deer the population in RMU 6, which is also within the Edwards Plateau, for the 2011-2012 hunting season to date, 196,948 deer have been harvested.

For more of this story, see Wednesday's Llano County Journal.