For more than a decade, Principia College has leased 1,700 acres of land to the deer hunting outfitter group, Illinois Trophy Bowhunters, gaining a significant portion of income for the Land Stewardship Department, and maintaining a sustainable deer population. The hunting season starts Oct. 1 and runs through the end of December, and for four of those weeks, Bowhunters hunt on campus.
Why does Prin allow the hunters, and does anyone else hunt on campus?
Illinois Trophy Bowhunters is an organization that leases land from 30 properties in the area to provide clients from around the United States with a hunting experience. For four weeks, the company provides small groups who pay $3,000 for a week of hunting with new equipment and vehicles. The Bowhunters set up tree stands just before the season begins, and plant and maintain food plots throughout the year to entice deer near the tree stands. Their clients are set to arrive on campus Oct. 29 and begin hunting the next day.
Before the group begins hunting, select portions of the hunting zones are open to employee and guest hunters for free. These areas include the woods behind the facility office and Crafton Athletic Center. The rest of the hunting zones are closed off, waiting for the bowhunters, to prevent scaring deer away in these open areas. Employee and guest hunters have to follow state laws and are only allowed to kill or “harvest” female deer, or does. Since does can produce two fawns every year from age one, only harvesting does is an effective way to manage a deer population.
The Bowhunters’ clients may hunt both bucks and does because they pay a large amount of money and are from places that don’t encounter deer as big as the ones at Prin. It is common to find large deer in agricultural areas like rural Illinois, where they can feed on corn and soybeans, according to Samson Myers, assistant land stewardship manager at Prin.
What does Prin get out of the relationship with Illinois Trophy Bowhunters?
The money that the bowhunters pay when they lease Prin’s land goes directly into the Land Stewardship Department’s budget. This budget is one of the only ones on campus that doesn’t zero out every year, which means the department must generate the money that they want to use. The Bowhunters’ money accounts for about half of the department’s total budget. The income is used to pay student workers, buy supplies, and essentially fund the department.
“It made sense to generate a small income from [the deer hunting program] that we could invest back into the land,” said John Lovseth, land stewardship manager. With the money, they have been able to work on habitat restoration, hill prairie restoration, buy seeds, and build trails.
A good relationship between Prin and the bowhunters ultimately looks like mutual respect, according to the land stewardship faculty. Some measures that Prin takes to provide the Bowhunters with a good hunting experience include closing off most of the property weeks before the hunters arrive, in order not to spook the deer; working closely with them to make sure they have good visibility from their tree stands; and widening and maintaining trails to ensure their vehicles won’t be damaged.
This effort doesn’t go unnoticed by the Bowhunters. “People here have been great, helpful. The best place to work with,” representatives of the Bowhunters group told The Pilot.
This symbiotic relationship between Principia and the Bowhunters is essential for Land Stewardship’s budget. However, the Bowhunters group leaders say it is also important to them because they want their clients to have the best experience possible.
Are there other benefits to this program?
There are ecological merits to the deer hunting program, too. When this program first began in 1998, there was an overwhelmingly large number of deer on campus, as high as 60 deer per square mile.
When there is overpopulation with deer, different concerns arise. Diseases among the deer, such as chronic wasting disease, spread, overgrazing of native plants as well as farmers’ crops occurs, and deer-car collisions. Without hunting pressure, the problems won’t go away, so professors in the biology department decided to find a solution.
The program commenced with inviting guests for a couple of years, and by 2006, they hired an outfitter group. A few years later, they met Steve Phelps, the founder of Illinois Trophy Bowhunters, and soon leased his group 1,700 acres. Today, the number of deer on campus has decreased to about 27 deer per square mile. However, it is still considered high.
While a lot of property has been closed off for hunting, there are still areas open for community access, recreation, and education. The parts of the property that are closed off are areas that most of the student body don’t stray into, according to faculty, unless they’re students in specific classes, such as ecology and ecosystem management majors, or student workers in land stewardship.
Nobody has been hurt by one of the deer hunts, and this year, “the deer hunting is going smoothly, there’s been no issues,” said Samson Myers, assistant land stewardship manager and current overseer of the deer hunt.
