Roe Deer Survival Patterns: A Comparative Analysis of Contrasting Populations

Abstract

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Comparative evaluation of effort, capture and handling effects of drive nets to capture roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), Southern chamois (Rupicapra pyrenaica) and Spanish ibex (Capra pyrenaica)

“…Mean mortality found in our study (3.1%) and in other studies capturing wild ungulates with nets (Van Laere and Boutin 1990;Sullivan et al 1991;Boutin et al, 1993;Gaillard et al 1993;Meneguz et al 1994) are below the 4.9-8.3% mortality reported when using corral traps to capture Spanish ibex, mouflon (Ovis aries musimon) and Southern chamois (Hansen et al 1993, Marco 1995Pérez et al 1997). Our mortality data are also included within the lower range of the mortality reported for snares when capturing chamois, which ranges from 0% to 11.1% (Appolinaire et al 1984;García-González et al 1993;Berducou 1993;Struch and Baumann 2000), and for box traps, which ranges from 0% to 5.6% (Mattfeld et al 1972;Abderhalden et al 1998;Casas-Díaz 2007).…”

“…Previously reported mortality for roe deer captured with drive nets ranged from 1.3% to 4.2% (Van Laere and Boutin 1990; Sullivan et al 1991;Boutin et al 1993;Gaillard et al 1993;Meneguz et al 1994). Mortality in this study (3.2%) falls in this range.…”

“…Wild ungulates have been captured in Europe by means of anaesthesia (Abderhalden et al 1998;Marco and Lavín 1999;Dematteis et al 2008), box traps (Abderhalden et al 1998;Willisch and Ingold 1996;Casas-Díaz et al 2008), corral traps (Marco 1995;Pérez et al 1997), snares (Appolinaire et al 1984;Cugnasse et al 1988;Ballesteros and Benito 1992;Menaut 1994;Struch and Baumann 2000;Willisch and Ingold 1996) and nets, including cannon nets (Menaut and Loison 1994), drop nets (Hansen et al 1993;Jullien et al 2001;Jedrzejewski and Kamler 2004;Lamberti et al 2006;Kamler et al 2008;Loison et al 2008) and drive nets (Van Laere and Boutin 1990;Gaillard et al 1993;Meneguz et al 1994Meneguz et al , 1996Meneguz et al , 1997Marco and Lavín 1999;Montané et al 2002Montané et al , 2003López-Olvera et al 2006a, b, 2007Casas-Díaz et al 2008). However, capture methods have been considered a way to obtain data from wild ungulates rather than a study issue, and only a limited number of articles (mainly in "grey" literature) deals with performance and characteristics of capture methods in wild ungulates in Europe.…”

“…Drive nets have been extensively used to capture a range of wild ungulates (Jones 1984;Kock et al 1987a, b;Sullivan et al 1991;Peterson et al 2003), including roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) (Van Laere and Boutin 1990;Boutin et al 1993;Gaillard et al 1993) and Southern chamois (Rupicapra pyrenaica ;Berducou 1993;Fernández-Arias et al 1993;Catusse et al 1994), but, to our knowledge, this is the first time this method has been used to capture the Spanish ibex (Capra pyrenaica), a mountain ungulate endemic from the Iberian peninsula. Besides chemical methods (Escós and Alados 1993;Peinado et al 1993;Pérez et al 2003), this species has previously been captured with box traps (Peinado et al 1993), corral traps (Pérez et al 1997(Pérez et al , 1999(Pérez et al , 2003 and foot snares .…”

Who wants to live forever? Roe deer survival in a favourable environment

“…We found no overall difference between yearling and adult survival. Gaillard et al (1993) found that the survival of ''juvenile'' roe deer was more sensitive to external influences compared to adult survival. We do find this difference in the model with the lowest deviance from the data, but this effect was not significant.…”