7. Deer Hunting in McDonald Forest

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: When you took over, what plans did you have for the forest?

William A. Davies: Well, first thing I wanted to do was to get a good inventory of everything that was there, and a good map to work from, and then make the plans from there. We would make plans two or three years ahead for concentrated management - a general idea for way out in the future. It was very simple. We set up a priority of uses on the forest: number one priority was instruction; number two, research and demonstration - that's what the forest was for - number three, commercial operation; and number four, recreation. That was back in 1959 that we set those priorities up, because there was some conflict between certain types of recreation, and our instruction and research. You see, at that time, even though we put gates up and kept people out of there, we still had a lot of vandalism in our research plots - some things that couldn't be duplicated, I guess. So there was a conflict. So we put recreation down at the bottom. We had controlled recreation like the deer hunt every year that the boys killed them - a lot of deer out there on that controlled deer hunt.

7. DEER HUNTING IN MCDONALD FOREST

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: When was the first deer hunt initiated in the forest? Do you know?

William A. Davies: It was while Nettleton was still manager, maybe in the late forties or early fifties. It was bow and arrow only to start with; we did that first. For quite a while people said, "Oh, that's got to be a preserve. You can't kill any deer out there," and all that thing, you know. Well, the deer got so thick that we couldn't get any survival in our tree planting, so then we decided to open up for bow and arrow. Well, the first year or two they got quite a few, because the deer were all tame out there by then. They couldn't get enough; the deer herd built up and built up. Then they opened it for rifles and they started to get up to 600 or 700 deer a year. Very high kill.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Did it have a noticeable impact on the survival of seedlings?

William A. Davies: Oh yes, after a year or two it did. The game commission was quite interested in it, of course, and the Department of Fish and Game here. One of the professors over there that came a little bit later got really interested in that. He'd take his seniors out there when- ever they had the deer hunt and check in all the deer and measure them, and weigh them, and everything else - I guess they had some master's thesis on it, and so forth. And deer count, see how many deer were out there. Best kept records, I guess, on deer hunts of any place in the state, and it proved that you can hunt an area heavily if the food is there for the deer, and you can't get the herd down below a certain level and still have a viable population.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: That's interesting.

William A. Davies: If you want to get rid of the deer, you just grow timber and let it close over. There can't be any deer then, because a deer has to have protein, and there's no protein on food that's in the shade - has to be out in the sun. As soon as you cut over a clear cut, population of deer just goes right up there, like that. Like the Tillamook Burn; there were very few deer in there when all that timber was there. When they had the Tillamook Burn the deer got so thick over there they killed 10 or 20 times as many as during the season and they still got thicker. Now they are going down again, because the timber is coming back and shading their food. So the perfect deer management is some clearcuts and some timber: