Spatiotemporal patterns of male and female white-tailed deer on a hunted landscape

Resource selection in sexually dimorphic ungulates is at least partially
explained by sex-specific resource requirements and risk aversion
strategies. Females generally spend more time in areas with less risk and
abundant, high-quality forage due to their smaller body size. However,
demographically variable responses to risk are context dependent, and few
have concurrently quantified male and female behavior within areas with
the same resource base. We captured 111 (54 males, 57 females) adult
white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) from 2009–2018 on a site in
South Carolina, USA, where hunters were the primary source of adult
mortality. We fit each deer with a GPS collar programmed to collect
locations at 30-min intervals. Upon collar recovery, we analyzed the data
to estimate sex- and time-specific selection for, and distance to, various
cover types. While both sexes generally avoided risky areas (i.e., sites
hunted more frequently) during the day, females (p = 0.41) were more
likely than males (p = 0.16) to use risky areas containing abundant food
resources during the day, where p = probability of selection. Our findings
indicate that female white-tailed deer may be forced to utilize high risk
areas during high risk periods due to their smaller body size and
increased nutritional demands, whereas larger males are better able to
forgo foraging opportunities during risky periods to mitigate risk,
however, our study design left room for the possibility that our
observations were driven by innate sex-specific patterns in white-tailed
deer. Nonetheless our study contributes information to the literature by
describing sex-specific resource selection by diel period on a site where
sexes shared the same resources and were presented with the same landscape
of risk. --