WhiteTailedDeer_CaesarKleberg_Hewitt_David_KingsvilleTX_25May2024_Reel4207.mp3

David Hewitt [00:00:01] You know, to understand really a lot of the wildlife in North America, you do need to go back, let's say, to the late 1800s, because there was very much still a, you know, kind of an exploitation view of wildlife at that time.

David Hewitt [00:00:16] And it was true for beavers. It was true for bison. It was in a lot of the game birds - they'd send wagon loads and train loads of prairie chickens to market.

Speaker [00:00:27] Same thing with deer: deer were seen as a resource. The hides, the meat, could be harvested and shipped to market.

David Hewitt [00:00:36] And so, through the late 1800s, a lot of things happened, including the railroads got well established. So, it opened up markets that hadn't been opened previously so they could ship meat and hides long distances, rifles, just numbers of people, access to areas.

David Hewitt [00:00:53] All those things changed in such a way that many wildlife populations, including white-tailed deer, got pushed to very low levels, to a point where it would be newsworthy if you saw a deer. It would be newsworthy throughout the county if someone saw a deer in the county, because they may go years without seeing a deer.

David Hewitt [00:01:12] And so, that was kind of where things were in the early 1900s...

David Hewitt [00:01:16] And I'm going to do a little detour here, just kind of bring it back, sort of local here in South Texas, because there's a parallel story going on that I think reflects some of the broader trends for deer nationwide.

David Hewitt [00:01:29] And I work at this Institute called the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute. So, there was a gentleman, Caesar Kleberg, who came to South Texas in 1900 and worked on the King Ranch from 1900 to his passing in 1946.

David Hewitt [00:01:46] And in doing so, he brought with him a passion for wildlife. And he saw this decline of wildlife playing out here, where he was managing in South Texas.

David Hewitt [00:01:55] And one of the things that really kind of brought especially the deer's plight to his attention was they put a railroad in from Kingsville south to Brownsville. And it cut across some areas that were probably some of the still most wild areas in North America, in the United States anyway.

David Hewitt [00:02:13] And part of that was on the King Ranch where Caesar Kleberg was working. And they were shooting deer to feed the railroad workers.

David Hewitt [00:02:22] And, you know, Caesar Kleberg's like, "You know, this is not sustainable. This can't be."

David Hewitt [00:02:27] And so, he worked pretty hard in getting some, you know, just kind of landowner-enforced regulations on private lands that he was managing on the King Ranch. And they were real simple things like no hunting during the rut, and reducing doe harvests, and a variety of things for turkeys and quail and other wildlife too.

David Hewitt [00:02:45] But it kind of changed the mindset of what wildlife is: it's no longer a resource to be exploited. It's a resource that has values, one of which is hunting, others which are are just having them there and enjoying wake up in the morning, and have a cup of coffee and look out and see some deer in the pasture. You know, there's, there's value in that.

David Hewitt [00:03:04] So, Caesar Kleberg kind of took that on, and then did some things that people elsewhere in the country were doing for white-tailed deer. There were some pockets where there were still deer. And those pockets served as some sources of reintroduction into areas that had really had deer extirpated.

David Hewitt [00:03:21] We may have got down to a few hundred thousand deer in the United States, and that still seems like a fair number of deer. But if you spread them out across everything from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean, that's not a lot of deer. And, you know, we're up into the tens of millions of deer now. So maybe it puts kind of how perilous things were back around the turn of the century: puts that in context a little bit.

David Hewitt [00:03:47] So, others, in the eastern U.S. and on King Ranch, found some little pockets of deer, kind of nurtured them, protected them, let them grow, and then started some active reintroduction programs - with state agencies and other landowners. I know there were some significant reintroduction programs in North Carolina, a lot across the Southeast eventually. So, there's deer that got moved from some of those different areas.

David Hewitt [00:04:15] There's also deer from South Texas, right near Kingsville, that were reintroduced in different places across the southeastern U.S. and across Texas.

David Hewitt [00:04:24] So, that was a turning of the tide, I think, on how people viewed deer: not a resource to be exploited, but a precious resource to be stewarded and cultivated and then be able to be there for for whatever it is that people enjoy having them for.