Honyurui Kagaku (Mammalian Science)

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The purpose of this study was to clarify the characteristics of the home range of the sika deer in the Tanzawa Mountains.
The relationship between the home range and degradation of undergrowth vegetation was also examined. The investigation was carried out by the radiotelemetry method. A transmitter was fixed to 5 adult deer between 1991∼1994. In the study area, artificial feeding was carried out in the winter of 2000. From this investigation, it was observed that there was no notable change in the seasonal home range for the deer which did not utilize the feeding field, while the deer that fed from the feeding field formed a seasonal home range around the field in the winter.
The annual home range of the radio collared deer was mostly constant, only small changes were observed.
The snow cover in the study area was light, and there was no hunting at this time. There was no remarkable regional difference in the food environment. The radio collared deer did not seem to migrate. By the attraction to the feeding environment, the home range of non-migratory deer seemed to change little in the winter. The deer seemed to confine themselves to a small area since the home range of the radio collared individuals did not change much.
From this fact, the deer seems to have an ecological characteristic which thoroughly utilizes food resources in a small area.
It may be inferred that this characteristic contributed to the degradation of the undergrowth vegetation.

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We evaluated the utility of GPS collars for Sika deer (Cervus nippon) in temperate forests in northern Osaka. The collar successfully signaled locations in young Japanese cypress stands, Japanese red pine stands, broad-leaved deciduous stands and a dry rice paddy. The canopy openness at each point was more than 10%, and DOP (dilution of precision) was less than 5, while locations were not fixed under broad-leaved evergreen stands where canopy openness was 6.3% (Mean). We examined the performance of two GPS collars fitted onto Sika deer every 3 hours for 392 and 372 days, respectively. The GPS collars signaled the location successfully in 26.9% (846/3141, number of locations/number of all positioning trials) and 20.7% (618/2989) of cases. The successful trial ratio decreased over the summer, while DOP value was not affected by season. The vegetation types around the GPS locations were young Japanese cypress stands, broad-leaved forests with pine wilt disease infections, broad-leaved deciduous stands and rice paddies, but there was no difference in DOP among these vegetation types.

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