Wildflowers love Hunters

By Jeff Tome

There is a trail in Crawford County, Pa that has an amazing number of wildflowers. I wish I knew the name of it, but can only ever remember what everyone I know calls it: “Rachel Lane”. My wife, the Rachel of Rachel Lane, hiked there almost daily before we met and often took me for hikes there when we were dating. Since then, we make regular pilgrimages to the site when we are in the area.

The trail is muddy and wet and set on a Pennsylvania State Game Lands along the shores of Woodcock Lake. After twenty years of hiking there, we know what blooms where and when different plants flower. It is an amazing little trail.

Well, it was an amazing trail. When we first started hiking there, this gamelands was well trafficked and well hunted. Over the last few years, the hunters seem to have stopped hunting as much.

The deer population at Rachel Lane has soared. The wildflowers were decimated. Our hikes once wound through areas where there were trillium blooming as far as you could see. Trilliums are one of the first plants to go when the deer population gets high. The deer eat them to the ground. The trillium there aren’t dead yet, but they have stopped blooming and get smaller every year.

The simple scientific fact is that deer eat forests. The wolves and Mountain Lions that once hunted deer were hunted out of the area over 150 years ago. The only predators left are humans and the occasional coyote. The forests could benefit from fewer deer.

The more deer there are, the shorter the trillium grows, according to a paper cumbersomely titled  “The impact on White Trillium, “Trillium grandiflorum height is an indicator of white-tailed deer density at local and regional scales”. Trillium is a long-lived plant, growing to be at least 32 years old. If it is chewed down year after year, it simply gets shorter and shorter and may disappear over time.

Hunters provide one of the few checks on deer populations in the region. As such, they are forest saviors. If you want to see a lot wildflowers, they are easiest to find in areas that are hunted. Where the deer population is high, the forest fills with things that the deer don’t like to eat. These plants may be a less tasty native, like Leeks, or it may be invasive plants like Garlic Mustard, honeysuckle, and Multiflora Rose.

The grounds at Audubon Community Nature Center provide a great look at unhunted property. Spring wildflowers are hard to find, often lurking behind a fence or under the branches of a fallen tree. The bottoms of old white pines and hemlocks are trimmed off at about six feet off the ground, where the deer can reach in winter. New trees are often two feet high, mowed off each winter as the deer eat their tops off. Some of those two foot high trees are over twenty five years old.

The deer provide relentless pressure on the forest. This pressure is not just on the plants, but ranges throughout the forest. According to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, “the ecological changes created by deer cascade through forest plant communities into wildlife communities, reducing the abundance and diversity of songbird species that use the intermediate levels of a forest.”

And so, I have to appreciate deer hunters. This group of people is preserving the diversity of our forests for the next generation. By lowering the population of deer, they improve the number of shrubs, wildflowers, songbirds and more in the forest. Deer hunters have become as essential to a healthy forest as the wolves and Mountain Lions were decades ago.

Audubon Community Nature Center builds and nurtures connections between people and nature. ACNC is located just east of Route 62 between Warren and Jamestown. The trails are open from dawn to dusk and birds of prey can be viewed anytime the trails are open. The Nature Center is open from 10 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. daily except Sunday when it opens at 1 p.m. More information can be found online at auduboncnc.org or by calling (716) 569-2345.

Jeff Tome is Public Engagement Specialist at Audubon Community Nature Center.