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ŠUMARSKI LIST 9-10/2022 str. 69     <-- 69 -->        PDF

Monitoring of reintroduced red deer in the area of Tara (Western Serbia): incidence of bark stripping within an acclimatisation enclosure and postrelease movements
Monitoring reintroduciranog jelena običnog na području Tare (Zapadna Srbija): opseg guljenja kore u prihvatilištu i kretanje poslije ispuštanja
Slavko Mladenović, Milan Malinić, Boris Radić, Dragica Vilotić, Srđan Stamenković, Dragan Gačić
Summary
The modern approach in the development of programs for the reintroduction of red deer was applied for the first time in Serbia. We compared the most important planned and implemented activities in the period 2018-2021, and assessed the results achieved in the Mt. Tara area. The plan was to hold the red deer (5♂ + 15♀) in the acclimatisation enclosure for several months and release them into the selected favourable area (150 km2) during three consecutive years. Bark stripping occurred mainly on thinner common hazel stems of coppice origin (≤ 9.9 cm). Total mortality among the 72 red deer that were transported to the acclimatisation enclosure was 8.3%. The longest movement of a 4-year-old female (held for 15 weeks) was 24 km. During the study period, no bark stripping was observed outside the acclimatization enclosure, nor were any deaths of the released red deer registered. In the period 2019-2021, 74 red deer were released from the acclimatization enclosure into the Mt. Tara area, which is about 60% of the estimated capacity of the selected favourable area.
Key words: Cervus elaphus L., reintroduction, population, management, GPS collar
INTRODUCTION
UVOD
In the past, red deer (Cervus elaphus L.), as an indigenous species was present in large numbers in many forest complexes in today’s central Serbia, whose forest cover is about 37%, with mostly coppice forests occupying 66% or 1.38 million hectares (Gačić et al., 2020). According to the data from the statistical survey on hunting (Form LOV-11, municipal level, www.stat.gov.rs), in the spring of 2019 the estimated number of red deer was 6,268 individuals, of which 2,056 individuals or 32.8% were in Central Serbia: 1,593 individuals in the statistical region of Southern and Eastern Serbia, and 463 individuals in the statistical region of Šumadija and Western Serbia (Fig. 1). More precisely, the