Seasonal home range shift of red deer hinds, Cervus elaphus:

Title:

Seasonal home range shift of red deer hinds, Cervus elaphus:
are there feeding reasons?

Creator:

Szemethy, László, Mátrai, Katalin, Katona, Krisztián, and Orosz, Szilvia

Identifier:

https://cdk.lib.cas.cz/client/handle/uuid:0d545840-8912-6c11-5a1d-c44e98c4ec3a
uuid:0d545840-8912-6c11-5a1d-c44e98c4ec3a

Subject:

diet composition, habitat change, nutritive quality, faeces analysis, and forest-agriculture habitat

Type:

article and TEXT

Description:

This work shows records of seasonal home range shift of radio collared red deer hinds (Cervus elaphus L., 1758) in southern Hungary from a forested block to the surrounding agricultural area every June between 1994–2000. Better quality of agricultural than forest forages is suggested as the main reason for this shift. Two hypotheses were tested: i) red deer consume mainly cultivated plants in the agricultural area and ii) agricultural plants are more nutritious than those in the forest at the time of home range shifting. Composition of forest and agricultural diet was determined by microhistological faeces analysis and the nutritive quality was assessed by the amount of crude protein and crude fibre content. Red deer diet was dominated by browse in the forest (65–85 %) whilst, in agricultural fields, wood species were as important as grasses (26–44 and 39–55 %, respectively). Consumption of cultivated plants was low (under 10 %) in the agricultural area. Nutritive quality of the diet was lower at the agricultural site than in the forest due to lower crude protein and higher crude fibre content. Seasonal home range shift of red deer hinds therefore, could not be explained by better nutritive quality of agricultural plants only. We suggest other factors that could potentially explain this behaviour.

Language:

English

Rights:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Source:

Folia zoologica | 2003 Volume:52 | Number:3

Harvested from:

CDK

Metadata only:

false