Don Davis is a retired Virginia Cooperative Extension agent. He
can be reached at dodavis2@vt.edu.
Posted: Tuesday, January 8, 2013 3:33 pm
newsadvance.com
Our abundance of whitetail deer was the subject of a recent article in The Washington Post called “To Get Along With Deer, We Need to Shoot a Few.”
It was written by Jim Sterba, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and the author of “Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds.”
It seems deer were almost gone a hundred years ago when game conservation programs began. The 30 million or so deer living in the eastern U.S. at the time of Columbus had been whittled down to about 350,000 in widely scattered locations.
What brought down their numbers was market hunting for hides. Native Americans sold hides to European traders to get things like cooking pots and guns. White people got into shooting deer for profit and in the time of Daniel Boone a hunter could kill 30 deer in a day.
Conservation programs worked well over many decades. Today’s whitetail population is 25 to 40 million.
Sprawling cities and suburbs are “deer nirvana.” They have a smorgasbord of tasty foods and there are no more wolves or mountain lions to bother the deer. Hunting has been banned in most residential areas, taking the other natural deer predator — humans — out of the equation.
However, people do kill deer by accident using their cars and the cost is $1.5 billion per year. There are 4,000 deer vs. vehicle collisions every day in the U.S., and 250 people die each year in these wrecks. The yearly deer deaths total 1.5 million.
Of course deer are impacting agriculture too. They browse on everything from lawns, gardens and landscaping to orchards and farm crops.
The impact of deer on forests is profound. Deer gobble up tree seedlings and other plants growing on the forest floor. Deer can threaten rare plants, not to mention animals and birds that depend on them in the forest under story environment. Sterba asserts “deer have become defacto forest managers.”
Deer easily exceed their food supply. In most places this happens when there are more than 20 deer per square mile, and in many residential areas their population is now 50 to 100 per square mile.
Hunters shoot 6 million whitetails a year and a similar number dies from disease and predators, but this is not enough to stabilize the herd. Stabilizing requires killing two-thirds of the deer each year, according to Sterba.
Birth control has been tried and it does work in places where the deer are contained by fences. It is costly and impractical for free roaming deer.
Deer have become demonized in some areas, with people calling them rats and mountain maggots. Sterba believes the whitetail deer “can resume its place in our lore, our communities and our hearts” if we can just control their numbers.
He says “Bambi doesn’t deserve this.”
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Tuesday, January 8, 2013 3:33 pm.
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