Here the link. get your read on gang, this is a big one and it's well worth the time.
White-Tailed Deer in the Southern Forest Habitat, the Proceeding of a Symposium at Nacogdoches Texas, March 25-26, 1969
This is a little different than the lone papers I've been posting in this series. This is a syposium or conference transcript of presented 2 dozen plus research papers and dozens of professionals.
Any Habitat manager, new or seasoned would do well to read this entire symposiums papers.
I found this collection while researching several years ago, it captivated my curiousity and I spent the entire day gobbling up every word while jotting down the reference citations to explore. There's a lot of mushroom talk in most of these papers, it's not glossed over like today's talkers, no sir, there's an importance placed on them in both range appraisal, diet diversity and even movement.. AH, the good ol days indeed. If you missed the memo in the previous blogs, this conference was happening less than a year prior to magic mushrooms being criminalized and fungi becoming a big no-no in our society which I speculate may have led to shelving of this notion and seperation of fungi from deer discussion.
If you read nothing else in this work, please try these three on for size.
Foods and Feeding Habits of White-Tailed Deer, Daniel W. Lay
Physiology and Nutrition of Deer in Southern Upland Forest, Henry L. Short
Factors in Habitat Appraisal, William Zeedyk
That last one is where the excerpt in the featured image is derived and oh boy is that a fun read which i hope you look into yourself.
In my not so quiet opinion these folks were on the right track, their independent observations across large regional seperations and the experiences they were having with field studies and fungi were something they didn't fully understand yet. But, they were looking into it more and more as well as sharing their experiences with colleagues to advance the body of knowledge, which we could use more of these days.
One thing is for absolutely sure after reading this, theres no shortage of scientific literature citing the importance of fungi to the game species world.