1I was first introduced to the Black Hills in 1991 as a new assistant professor at South
Dakota State University (SDSU). I had just earned a PhD from Oklahoma State
University, where I had studied white- tailed deer nutrition on lands in southeastern
Oklahoma and southwestern Arkansas owned and operated by the Weyerhaeuser
Com pany. When I arrived at SDSU, I acquired three students who were working on
deer and elk (Cervus elaphus) in the Black Hills. Two of them were in the midst of col-
lecting data for their proj ects, one in the northern Black Hills and the other in Custer
State Park. My department head, Chuck Scalet, strongly suggested that I travel to the
Black Hills to meet the students and to get a feel for this new (to me) state of South
Dakota, where I would be devoting much of my time to conducting research and teach-
ing students about wildlife ecol ogy and management.
My son, Jonathan, and I piled into our Mercury Lynx and headed west from Brook-
ings, South Dakota, just a few weeks after arriving in the state. It was late July, and
we traveled due west through the corn and soybean fields of eastern South Dakota to
Pierre and then across the high plains of western South Dakota to Sturgis, which is
on the outskirts of the northern Black Hills (fig. 1.1). After meeting with one of my
new students, along with employees of South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks and
Wyoming Game and Fish, we headed south through the timbered mountains (hills)
to Mount Rushmore (a diversion from my objective but a must- see for both my son
and me), and fi nally to Custer State Park, where I met my second student. My initial
feeling for the Black Hills was essentially one of going home. I was raised on a dairy
farm in eastern Mas sa chu setts and had spent nine years in Maine obtaining bache-
lor’s and master’s degrees from Unity College and the University of Maine, respec-
tively, studying wildlife ecol ogy and management. My master’s proj ect involved
accepting abandoned fawns to establish a captive herd of white- tailed deer (Odocoileus
CHAPTER 1