Calling All Deer with Dr. Larry Marchinton
Calling Deer
 Editor’s
Note: What is a hunter saying to a deer when the woodsman
blows a call? What c alls
are the most effective? What actually is meant by the
sound that the hunter is trying to imitate? Although
every hunter and each call manufacturer has his own
notion, at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia,
the sounds that whitetail deer make and what they mean
by these sounds have been scrutinized carefully by a
team of scientists that included Dr. Larry Marchinton,
the former head of the University of Georgia’s
Deer Research Project, who’s now retired. This
week Dr. Marchinton shares his research on deer vocalization.
“First of all we have to define deer vocalization
as sounds that deer make to communicate with one another,”
Marchinton explained. “But we’re just in
the infant stages of learning how deer communicate.
So at this point, we’re trying to learn what questions
to ask about deer communications rather than coming
up with some hard-formed conclusions. Although deer
may very well have a language, we don’t know this
for sure. Remember that deer vocalization is a relatively-new
area of investigation. The first papers containing scientific
data on deer vocalization were published in 1981 –
one at University of Mich igan
by a gentleman named Richardson and the other at about
the same time by Tom Atkinson for his PhD  dissertation
at the University of Georgia. From these two papers
and the resulting ongoing research, biologists now know
that deer do communicate a lot of information through
the sounds they make, including alarm, aggression, the
desire to mate, and the wish to make contact as well
as calls between the mothers and fawns and many more
calls we don’t know about at this time.”
Tomorrow: Types of Deer Calls
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