Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/409

 CONSERVATION OF THE NATIVE FAUNA 403

The tme mule deer is the form characteristic of the Sierra Nevada and the mountains of the extreme northeastern portion of the state in Modoc county. The mountains in southern California west of the desert proper are occupied by a small subspeci^ called the California mule deer^ the range of which extends north at least to San Luis Obispo county and the Tehachapi mountains.

The burro deer {Odocoileus hemionus eremicus) formerly occurred on the deserts of the southwestern portion of the state bordering on the Colorado river. Members of the expedition from the Museum of Verte- brate Zoology to this region in 1910 were imable to find so much as a trace of the presence of the species, although they were told of its occur- rence in numbers many years before, "... when they were to be found both in the river bottom and back through certain desert ranges, where there are springs which the deer could visit regularly for water.^^^* No one in the vicinity had seen a deer within four years. As the record runs the date of the extirpation of the burro deer in California may be set down as approximately 1905 or 1906.

I may not leave the account of the deer without remarking the per- sistent rumors of the occurrence in the Modoc region of extreme north- eastern California of white-tailed deer (Odocoilevs virginianus macro- urus); but so far no definite evidence in the shape of specimens has come to light.

It is quite certain that not only have the deer decreased markedly since the beginning of the nineteenth century but also that they are fewer in numbers than they were, say, ten, or twenty years ago. In some sections, notably in southern California, they are losing ground rapidly; in others, as in the Trinity-Siskiyou region of northern Cali- fornia, they are reported to be holding their own and even in certain localities to be increasing. It is not improbable that the number of deer killed by hunters under modern conditions, large as it is, aggre- gates a much smaller total than in former days, when individual bands of hide and market hunters slaughtered deer by hundreds and even thousands in a season.

Incidentally, testimony to the size of California and to her com- parative supremacy as a game state even yet is given by the fact that in few states are more deer killed annually than are killed within her borders.

Elk

Our largest ungulate is the elk or wapiti, of which we have two species; one, perhaps known most commonly as the Eoosevelt elk {Cervvs roosevelti) formerly found numerously in the humid north coast belt south at least to the Golden Qate and east to Mount Shasta; the other, the valley elk (Cervns nannodes) found predominantly in the San Joa

" GrinneU, Univ. Calif. PubL Zool., 12, 1914, p. 219.

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