$20 wolf and cougar bounties in New York's Adirondacks during the 1800's equated nearly to a months laborer's wage...............No doubt such sums were coveted by many farmers and townsmen as a handsome income supplement...........This monetary inducement in combination with elimination of deer, moose, elk, caribou, buffalo and beaver helped speed the demise of Wolves and Cougars throughout New York State

The changeable deer

Population has fluctuated widely over time

 By GEORGE J. BRYJAK

Deer in New York and the Adirondacks

Ranier H. Brocke, professor emeritus at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse, gave me a brief overview history of deer in the Adirondacks and New York state. In the 1800s, hunters were paid $20 for each wolf and cougar taken, a significant amount of money when people often worked for a dollar or two a day. As a consequence, by the mid-1850s to 1880 these deer predators were all but eliminated. However, by the late 1800s any decline in mortality deer experienced from a lack of natural predators was offset by indiscriminate killing of these animals by settlers, often with the use of hunting dogs.
Leonard Lee Rue notes that Europeans "hunted deer far more intensively than did the Indians." Professional hunter Thomas Meacham of St. Lawrence County kept an exact record of his kills. When he died in 1850, Meacham had killed 214 wolves, 77 cougars, 219 bear and 2,550 deer. Rue notes there were "many such hunters."
In the first decade of the last century, efforts were made to conserve New York's deer population via regulations enacted by the Division of Fish and Game. Because of these regulations and the absence of natural predators, the deer population began to increase. As killing does was illegal, hunting had a minimal impact on the state's increasing deer population. Nelson Lafon, a deer manager in Virginia, states that you can kill all the bucks you want, and it won't make a difference - "You have to take does."
Conventional wisdom has it that coyotes interbred with Canadian gray wolves, resulting in "Eastern coyotes" that made their way south to the Adirondacks in the 1920s and were well established in the Park by the 1980s. (Bloomingdale naturalist Ed Kanze notes that we can't say "exactly how or where or when coyotes interbred with wolves.") Eastern coyotes weigh between 30 and 50 pounds, approximately twice the size of their Western cousins. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation estimates the summer coyote population at 20,000 to 30,000 animals(total State of NY, not just the Adirondacks).Brocke notes that a pack of six to eight coyotes can kill a deer every few days. Deer are a main source of food for Adirondack coyotes, especially in the winter when smaller prey live and hide under the snow. According to the DEC, in the spring months coyotes can impact the fawn survival rate "in localized areas."
In the early 1970s, before the coyote population had fully expanded into the Adirondacks and when doe hunting was still illegal in the Park, the deer population had increased to such high levels that forest reproduction was being severely over-browsed. Experimental "any deer" hunts were conducted (under DEC permit) by SUNY-ESF in its 15,000-acre Huntington Forest in the central Adirondacks. These controlled hunts reduced the local deer population from approximately 30 to 12 per square mile, allowing forest reproduction to fully recover.
Brocke believes that today's deer herd in the central Adirondacks is being held down to the single digits per square mile, especially on unlogged Adirondack wilderness areas, by a combination of occasionally severe winters and steady coyote predation.
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