When temperatures are below 10, and snow levels above 10, it stands to reason that anyone venturing into the backwoods in Pennsylvania could develop a love/hate relationship with tire chains.

“Although cumbersome, they’ve been essential in allowing us to access trap sites,” said Benjamin Smith, PGC, a field crew leader of the whitetail deer research crew. “I’d like to think we’ve achieved NASCAR pit crew status in terms of throwing them on the trucks.”

Researchers from Penn State, the US Geological Survey, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, and the PA DCNR Bureau of Forestry are combining efforts to study the state’s deer and the effect deer have on vegetation. The study is taking place in Rothrock, Bald Eagle and Susquehannock state forests.

Winter months are optimum for capturing deer, due to the sparse availability of food. Deer are captured in baited traps. Bucks, does and fawns are either outfitted with GPS collars or ear tags. Capturing and handling deer is challenging, more so in the winter-clad forest.

But the crew members have had success. In one week they processed 13 newly-tagged deer, from a total of 25 captures. One day the crew had 15 captures in one day. That work is exhilarating, but sometimes the crew will get a “mort mode” signal from a collar, which means the deer isn’t moving, and is likely dead.

“We performed our first collar retrieval of the season - one of our collared females in the southern Susquehannock kicked into mort mode,” Smith wrote in his weekly Deer Diary report. “She was pretty accessible about 200 ft off a hiking trail, but we didn’t get to her quick enough to decipher cause of death as the only parts left were the spine, pelvis, and legs.”

“There were numerous piles of deer hair scattered around the kill site along with coyote tracks and scat,” he added. “While coyotes were evidently present, it’s impossible to say whether they were a free meal or actually had to work for it.”

Sometimes the same deer are repeatedly caught, sometimes in a following month, sometimes in another year.

“While catching new deer is the goal, recaptures are fascinating in their own way, especially those deer trapped from prior years,” Smith wrote. “Not only do you find out that the individual animal lived to fight another year, but it’s also intriguing to look at their history.”

For instance, a buck was captured this winter that was initially caught in March 2017 – he is now at least 4.5 years old. He was recaptured twice during the winter of 2018. An adult doe was also collared in 2017 and recaptured twice in 2018.

“Her response to us handling her also seemed to indicate she’d been through the routine before,” Smith wrote. “She appeared healthy but was bizarrely well-behaved and calm while we restrained her and verified her ID - I guess they’re all individuals and have unique personalities.”

The crew also got a “mort mode” from another deer in Rothrock State Forest.

“We were hoping to just find a kicked collar but ended up finding a deer,” wrote Helen Schlemmer, field crew leader, PGC. “The crew did a great job locating the deer using our telemetry equipment, conducting the field investigation, and getting the deer out…which was an adventure - our deer was down in a valley and across a creek.

The deer was taken back to a truck and transported to Penn State University for necropsy. Although tracking the movements of live deer is most important to the studies, finding out why a deer died is also important to the researchers.

Want to follow the Deer Crew? You can subscribe to their reports by going to https://ecosystems.psu.edu/research and search under projects/deer. Through that website, you can subscribe for email updates from the field crews.