Excess deer: The solution
By V. Paul Reynolds
Put simply, there are just too many deer per square mile on Mount Desert Island. The deer have become a nuisance. Too many deer has led to a high incidence of car-deer crashes, over browsing of flower beds and vegetable gardens, as well as a spike in Lyme disease from deer ticks.
Recently, the Southwest Harbor select board met to decide what to do.
A number of years ago, I attended what can best be described as an upscale wedding in a fashionable, affluent Connecticut suburb. At the reception dinner, I got seated between two well-coiffured ladies who had no idea that I was a hard-core Maine deer hunter. Somehow the discussion got around to their state’s problem with an excess of white-tailed deer.
“I just don’t know what we can do,” one lady exclaimed. “They are so beautiful but they are eating all of our flowers and shrubs.”
“Yes, and they carry ticks that are infected with Lyme Disease, a problem that is getting worse around here,” the other lady said.
Each of them recounted that they knew of friends or neighbors who had contracted Lyme Disease. I mostly listened. These women then allowed that there was a solution: some sort of a scientifically-controlled contraceptive inoculation of Connecticut’s deer herd by wildlife biologists.
I jumped into the fray. “That can be awfully impractical, expensive and unreliable I have heard,” I offered. “Why not simply reduce your deer numbers by having a hunt?” I queried.
“What?” they exclaimed in unison. “Kill them?” Their facial expressions told the story. Raised eyebrows, big eyes and chins skyward. Suddenly, I was the proverbial skunk at the lawn party.
The conversation went downhill from there. Logic would not penetrate or persuade, and I was persona non grata at that table for the remainder of the dinner.
Hopefully, the Southwest Harbor municipal leadership has more common sense than the suburban housewives whose ire I raised at that Connecticut wedding. Back in Maine, according to the news reports, the island select board took no action on its deer problem. It voted to “continue exploring the options.”
Mount Desert Island is not the first Maine island to confront deer over populations. Monhegan Island in 1998 hired a professional sharpshooter to reduce its deer herd at considerable expense. There, today, we are told, Lyme Disease is practically unheard of.
A while back the town of Islesboro voted to hold a firearms deer hunt, reportedly the first in its history. Thanks to an excess of deer ( 60 per square mile) island residents at that time saw a drastic spike in ticks that carry Lyme disease. The goal was to reduce the deer density on the island from 60 per square mile to 10 per square mile.
What the Connecticut housewives and other ill-informed folks and anti-hunting rusticators failed to grasp was the fact that recreational hunting of deer is a recognized and effective wildlife management population-control tool: it is THE American conservation model. Predation, by humans as well as four-legged predators, is part of the natural order of things. Hunting deer, or any wild animal, is an integral component of effective, modern wildlife management.
Interestingly, deer hunting has not been allowed on Mount Desert island since the 1930s! If the Southwest Harbor leaders really want to begin addressing the deer issue, step one would be a phased in hunting season, at the very least by qualified and vetted bow hunters. This has been done successfully in other parts of Maine. Conversations with Maine state wildlife biologists and the Maine Bowhunter’s Association (MBA) would be a good starting point.
The author is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide and host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network. He has authored three books. Online purchase information is available at www.sportingjournal.com, Outdoor Books.