Home Range of White-Tailed Deer in Texas Coastal Prairie Brushland

Twenty-five female and 13 male white-tailed deer ( Odocoileus virginianus texanus ) were radio-tracked for an average of 2.2 months each on the Rob and Bessie Welder Wildlife Refuge during the period between February 1966 and August 1970. Two does and one buck were tracked twice. Home range areas were determined for animals using two methods of analysis. Grid home ranges, based on an analysis developed during the present study, provided an average estimated home-range size of 62 ± 6 ha among 12 does and 66 ± 8 ha among five bucks. Twenty-seven home ranges of does, determined by means of Jennrich and Turner's (1969) home-range ellipse technique, averaged 84 ± 8 ha, and 14 determined for bucks averaged 139 ± 37 ha. In neither case was there a significant difference between the sexes. Grid home ranges delineated home-range areas consisting mainly of combinations of small-scale, intensively used localities, activity centers (∼ fixpunkte of Hediger as cited by Ewer, 1968), within a more extensive action area (Walther, 1972). Shirts in the positions of the home ranges occurred in response to changes in the activity centers that were in use from time to time. The diameter of action areas must be estimated roughly by the “most distant fixes” (Hahn, 1945; Hahn and Taylor, 1950) obtained during the study. The ellipse technique provided a more theoretical, but statistically stable, estimate of home ranges. The difference in results from the two techniques was an orderly outgrowth of their underlying theories. All but eight of the 38 deer made exploratory excursions, termed trips , outside of their home ranges. As a function of differences in brush availability, some deer showed a temporal dichotomy of areas in use. Other deer, in more homogeneous habitats, failed to show such a dichotomy. Linearity of home range seemed to be a function of such dichotomies.