Rutting and rambling: Movement characteristics reveal partial migration in adult male white‐tailed deer at a latitude void of chronic and severe environmental fluctuations

Abstract

Abstract White‐tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) are generally considered a home‐ranging species, although northern populations may migrate between summer and winter ranges to balance resource requirements with environmental stressors. We evaluated annual home range characteristics of adult bucks (n = 30) fitted with GPS collars from 2017 to 2021 in central Mississippi with time series segmentation and Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) to determine if individuals employed varying movement strategies. We found 67% of bucks displayed a “sedentary” strategy characterized by a single KDE home range polygon with a mean size of 361 ha. The remaining 33% of bucks employed a “mobile” strategy characterized by multiple home range segments with a mean size of 6530 ha. Sedentary bucks went on an average of 5.9 excursions annually while mobile bucks went on 0.8. Excursion timing for both strategies peaked in breeding season and early spring. Mobile buck home ranges were separated by a mean distance of 7.1 km and mean duration in one home range segment before traveling to another was 78 days. Our study provides the first evidence that partial migration may apply to a larger proportion of lower‐latitude deer populations than originally thought, though the environmental justification for this partial migration is not clear.

Keywords

• excursions
• home range
• migration
• movement strategy
• partial migration
• white‐tailed deer