A dilemma of deer

Deer oh dear, how many deer there are here. And the numbers have become a real dilemma for the town. Recent Town Council discussions, covered at length in the local paper, and debated in the local sound-off columns, have fired the debate: what to do about all these deer.

Hunt them? That is the recommendation of the county Game and Fish department. Hold a special hunt, hire sharp-shooters, sponsor expert bow-men – reduce the population by culling. This is a typical recommendation of the hook-and-bullet crowd. Not a popular option for many former-urban dwellers who’ve relocated into wild country. Often, urban folks jump to negative judgment – conservation, especially in the West, owes much progress and success to people who hunt and fish for food or recreation. Hunt/fish organizations are often instrumental in turning the popular opinion in favor of conservation. And the argument will be made that culling is the most sure-fire way (pun intended) to manage overpopulation. Unfortunately, another argument can be made, just as persuasively, that it’s the hook-and-bullet folks that helped get us here facing the dilemma of too many bambis. Game and Fish departments at all levels, starting with the US Forest Service, have been known to cull predators and conduct re-introduction efforts to bring back deer – mule and otherwise – to habitats where they have disappeared by whatever, often natural, means. In central Maryland, white-tail deer had all but disappeared by the early 1900’s, cause not remembered by me in 2009. Hunters brought pressure on the state for a population of venison-on-the-hoof and the state graciously filled their plates by bringing a breeding population in from, I think it was, Pennsylvania. Now, across a significant portion of the state, if you drive a car for 2 years without hitting a deer, you get a plaque from your auto insurance company.

What else? Birth control! Now often touted as the ‘humane’ solution. It’s true that hunting can have ‘inhumane’ results with the possibility that the sharpshooter might miss and hit a two legged instead of the targeted four-legged. Or more likely, wound instead of kill the targeted four-legged and cause inhumane pain and suffering. Does happen. Does birth control work? I remember a conversation with a National Park Service biologist studying the overpopulation of white-tailed deer in central MD in which I facetiously suggested birth control for deer. In complete seriousness, the biologist gave me chapter-and-verse on the pros and cons of a very real alternative. At least given the state of deer medicine at the time (about 2003 or so), birth control was only administered to a ‘closed’ population, meaning one contained by man-made or natural barriers from ‘wild’ populations. The immunocontraceptive tainted the meat and if a birth-controlled deer was unknowingly hunted for food, consumption of the meat had deleterious effects on the consumer. More critically to the control effort, the vaccine still today has a low percentage of success and has to be re-administered every breeding season. Most critically, the solution is prohibitively expensive, costing as much as $1,000 per doe so vaccinated. What Game and Fish department, especially at a local level, has $1,000/doe times how many breeders? Does our Town Council wish to allocate additional funds to our Game and Fish folks to conduct a mass immunocontraceptive vaccine campaign -- annually!?

Hey, we can feed them!!! After all, they were here first and we moved in and pushed them out. So we are the cause of the problem and we should just step up and feed those poor critters. This is exactly the argument made by a Town Council member as printed in the Sun-News a couple of weeks ago. I am convinced that he made this argument in good conscience with the best of intention. He just couldn’t get comfortable with the notion that he and his colleagues on the Council would approve – and fund, no less – professional hunters to creep around our neighborhoods drawing an expert bead on an otherwise-innocent deer to reduce the free-range herd. He said he was more persuaded by his wife and friends that feeding was the best answer. Perhaps he should do a little research on the web. Corn, the most common feed purchased to put out for deer, does not truly “feed” the deer because they don’t get the sustenance they need from limited corn protein. Game and Fish biologists have found deer that died of starvation with full bellies. But at the heart of the matter, deer increase in suburban/urban neighborhoods because they thrive on the edges. They make their living on the seams and margins between woods for protection and human farms, gardens and landscaping. Feeding deer reinforces in several ways: keeps unhealthy deer in the population that otherwise would die of natural causes; keeps deer reproducing because they have just enough sustenance to conceive and birth, but not necessarily to foster healthy young; and concentrates deer in “feeding communities” instead of otherwise living in areas where they would be predated – or at least predated by other than 4-wheel predators! By the way, having this many deer in our neighborhoods can also attract their natural predators. The big cats sometimes follow the path of least resistance right into town to pick off an ailing or wounded deer. Many communities prohibit feeding of deer. I thought Silver City did. Maybe that’s one of the questions before the Town Council. They should vote for the ban. And they should prosecute people who put the corn or pellets out anyway. Does more harm than good. Kills the deer as surely as a rifle, but slower, silently and out of sight.

The last and least appealing option is to let the deer fend for themselves. Which means in good years, they have beautiful spindly-legged, big-eyed and big-eared spotted fawns—in singles, twins and even triplets. Over which I have ohhhed and awwwed as much as the next person. Which means that we are treated to magnificent bucks during rut season with huge racks, standing in the field with 3 does at his side. Which means that Nutmeg has something of interest to get her hackles up but which she’ll never catch. But it also means that we have to fence in our tomatoes and fragrant flowering bushes or they are nibbled to little sticks. And when there’s too little water and too little browse in bad years, the fawn mortality is high and the deer sicken and starve.

This is the 100th anniversary of Aldo Leopold’s lasting legacy to conservation, the environment and to the human community. And it started here, with the first official wilderness, the Gila Wilderness. We are celebrating his legacy here in Silver City this year. He wrote frequently about the impact that removing predators from the landscape had on the deer population. He wrote about the ethics of managing deer herds, including hunting. He wrote about the education of the community about the wildlife around them. Now we have a dilemma of deer on the doorstep of his legacy. Hmmm. What will our Town Council decide?