...The Problem Urban Deer Dilemma...

[fairfax1]

In another thread a seasoned poster here stated regarding Problem Urban Deer:

"On another note, I think the urban crossbow zone idea has some merit, it has been tried in some other States. Maybe someone should suggest it ....."

I think the ideas is 'thread-worthy'...even with that old reliable controversey trip-wire of 'crossbows'.

Clearly, problem urban-deer are getting a lot of press. There have been long articles in the national newspapers...NYTimes, Wall Stree Journal, USToday....on the problems caused by too many deer in suburban areas. Reducing those populations have caused immense....and expensive...headaches for city/county/park district governments.

With that said my entry into this threads' merry-go-round is this:

"Problem Urban Deer" must not be recreational-hunters' ballgame. Those of us who chase deer for fun have too much to lose by trying to slap that tarbaby. Problem-Urban-Deer (let's call 'em "PUD's") issues carry far far more emotional-baggage than probably any other hunting issue that I can think of (tho Michigan's doves got a little junk-in-the-trunk too, emotionwise).

For us, amatuer hobby-guys, it is virtually a no-win situation. The soccer-mom's don't want Bambi, or his bossy Mom, bleeding on the driveway. They'll scream long and loud to prevent it...calling us heartless killers, with some sort of male appendage issues. The press loves that kind of play. "Brittany Verrynice, mother of twins, and spokesperson for the 'Room for All God's Creatures League" states that deer are beautiful, gentle and graceful ....and hunters aren't."

Getting a little venison ain't worth that kind of exposure.

Now, to crossbows.....or any kind of archery equipment. That surely is not the answer either. Even if that equipment was wielded by very accomplished crossbow-marksmen or compound-bow wizards. Arrows just don't 'anchor' the animal to the spot. There is a darn good reason that the hired snipers that occasionally do this work use rifles...and not arrows. And that is: that deer is dead right now, right there. Period.

So, my brief is this, we amatuer hobby-guys (very especially we arrow-guys) should let this 'PUD' issue play out in someone else's court. Let the local governing body hire their snipers with their .243 Winchesters (at whatever $$ cost) and be done with the problem.

'Problem Urban Deer" should be here today and gone tomorrow. No fuss, no mess, no noise, no blaming 'kill-crazy-hunters'. Pay the bill, and move on.

[Erik]

Thats all fine and well as long as the biologists who make recamendations as to how many deer there are in a given DMU take that into account. And don't ask hunters to kill every deer in the areas open to hunting in order to make up for all those "PUD"s that can't be hunted.
Someone also made a comment in another thread about "nearly running into an antlerless while driving down peirce rd" while on his way to the population goals meeting the other night. Almost as if to say, "isn't that ironic". Trouble is the area where the meeting was held is a no hunting zone. There is no hunting west of peirce rd from cavanaugh lk rd to bush rd. The area is well known for car deer accidents.

[farmlegend]

The problem of urban/suburban/exurban deer (whatever) is a nasty one, perhaps even more difficult to solve than those thorny deer management issues we recreational hunters face. No easy solutions.

I'm with Fairfax, using hunters as a primary means of solving the urban deer problem puts hunters squarely in the "no-win" zone.

I live in a well-populated suburb with a growing deer problem. And here, it's not exactly like humans have encroached upon the deer's home range; folks have lived hereabouts for 175 years or so, while, as recently as 30 years ago, deer were practically unheard of in Northville Township. Whitetails are extraordinarily adaptable, and have literally moved into human's backyards.

The idea of growing a successful vegetable garden here is just an impossibility, and it's easy to tell which ornamental flowers and shrubs are most deer-preferred. Car/deer collisions are a regular occurrence. Deer are visible in my yard during daylight hours practically every day, and have even worked up a well-worn runway through the sod, right between my pond and tennis court.

In spite of what, to me, is an obvious problem, folks in the neighborhood (don't want to be sexist here, but it's really the women) love those adorable deer! They put out food for them, and speak about the deer with obvious affection.

I'm certain that efforts to reduce deer numbers through the use of professional "sharpshooter" firms would be met with vigorous opposition (many of these ladies have plenty of time on their hands, trust me). Using recreational hunters to harvest these deer would be worse, and could easily result in a public-relations disaster for us hunters.

I don't see folks in suburbia getting truly serious about confronting the urban deer problem until the deer somehow create human health issues.

[Munsterlndr]

The urban deer zones that some states have enacted do not allow hunting in areas that were formerly closed to hunting, so you are not going to see hunters traipsing through the backyards of subdivisions whacking deer.

What they do is increase the bag limit and liberalize the choice of weapons in huntable areas that are immediately adjacent to urban areas. For example, in Indiana's urban deer zone the bag limit for one license is a hunters choice of either 3 antlerless and one antlered or four antlerless deer.

It's not going to help a city like Grosse Pointe that is pretty much completely surrounded by development but it may help some of the outlying suburban areas.

In situations like this I'd just as soon see recreational hunters get a crack at taking some of these deer instead of resorting to paid sharpshooters.

[farmlegend]

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060108/METRO/601080408

Should hired guns thin local deer herds?

State officials want to reduce their numbers by nearly half in Metro Detroit

BY FRANCIS X. DONNELLY / The Detroit News

NORTHVILLE — A whitetail deer clomped past antique shops and posh clothiers on Main Street in this Victorian-style downtown before darting through the open door of a garden specialty shop.

Startling several customers in Gardenviews, it tried to jump through the front picture window only to bounce off, knocking over several metal stands of glass-blown ornaments. It then fled through another open door.

“We were eyeball to eyeball,” said sales associate Betsy Holda of the September incident. “It was interesting, to say the least.”

In southeast Michigan, deer have gone from rare stirring sightings to furry nuisances that invade residents’ gardens and, now, garden shops. They eat plants and crops, cause car wrecks, leave droppings and could lead to the spread of disease.

Which is why Michigan officials want to reduce their numbers by nearly half in Metro Detroit and nearly a third in the southern half of the Lower Peninsula.

They want to kill at least 266,000 of the 868,000 deer in south Michigan, and 54,000 of the 116,000 deer in Metro Detroit.

The Department of Natural Resources, which concedes that such drastic drops will be difficult to achieve, is holding meetings around the state to hear public response to its proposal. A session is planned for6 p.m. Jan. 19 at Summit Academy Schools in Romulus.

The plan promises to draw protests from animal-rights activists who have demonstrated in the past against the controlled shooting of deer by paid sharpshooters in Huron-Clinton Metroparks.

“Metroparks aren’t a place for guns, bows and arrows,” said Judy Brock, president of the Metroparks Deer Preservation Council. “People live around here.”

The DNR wants to encourage more hunting in Metro Detroit but hasn’t decided what type or how to do it. Some states have also tried to relocate or sterilize the deer with little success.

Rare in 1970, deer have become more plentiful in southern Michigan than the rest of the state combined, according to state figures.

In Metro Detroit, the animals mostly reside in the northern reaches but have spread to every city, including wooded pockets near downtowns. They’ve been spotted along Michigan Avenue in Dearborn, at Chrysler headquarters in Auburn Hills and along Interstate 94 at MetroAirport.

Some parts of OaklandCounty have 100 deer per square mile, according to state data.

Dean Martin, owner of Critter Control of North Oakland, began an orchard by planting 10 apple and peach trees at his home five years ago. The next morning, every leaf was gone.

Oh, deer!

“I put up an electric fence the next day,” he said.

Window of opportunity

The gleaming new subdivisions of Metro Detroit attract more than yuppies.

The leveled landscapes create the perfect habitat for deer: young trees with leaves that are easy to reach and grass and shrubs full of nutrients.

The development helps the animals a second way. The hunting that was allowed in the razed woods becomes outlawed in the new neighborhoods.

Add the fact that deer are highly fertile, capable of growing herds by 50 percent a year, and you have the makings of doe-eyed density, said Rod Clute, big game specialist with the DNR.

“If we harvest a third of the population, they can match that the following year,” he said.

“Then we’re right back where we started.”

As for the diminishing spaces where hunting is still allowed, local hunters sniff their noses at the sights. They prefer to go up north in a trek that is more traditional than about the probability of bagging a buck.

Only 13,000 of the 41,000 registered deer hunters in OaklandCounty hunt in the county, according to a DNR poll. Local hunters said it’s too difficult to secure the permission of local landholders to hunt on their property.

In Michigan, it’s illegal to shoot a gun within 150 yards of an inhabited building without the approval of the owner.

Deer move in

Marlene Alexander loves spying deer in northern Michigan but isn’t crazy about seeing them near her home in Livonia. The reason? A lot more are down here than up there.

The brazen pests, sometimes 13 strong, have eaten the azaleas and rhododendrons that surround her ranch-style home not to mention the vines that curl around the trees on her property.

“I go into the yard and yell at them,” the retired office manager said. “They just stand there and look at you like ‘Don’t bother me.'”

Other Metro Detroit residents make similar complaints. They tell stories of deer crashing through patio doors, deer that rummage through their garbage, deer that drop dead in their backyards.

State officials are concerned that the animal could spread bovine tuberculosis or chronic wasting disease. The ailments are now limited to north Michigan.

The state also is worried that the deer eat so much foliage that they threaten its regeneration.

Eating 10 to 12 pounds of food a day, there are few things the animal won’t eat, said Clute, the DNR specialist. Among their menu: pumpkins and melons, wild ginger and geraniums, corn and raspberries, bloodroot and trillium.

“The list of what they won’t eat you can fit into a thimble,” Clute said. “They eat anything and everything.”

The biggest, and sometimes deadly, problem caused by all the deer can be found in the dented hoods and broken headlights of cars in repair shops across southeast Michigan.

In 2004, 17 percent of car accidents in Michigan involved deer, according to the Michigan Deer Crash Coalition, a group of insurance and law enforcement officials.

The state had 62,707 deer-related accidents. They led to three deaths, 1,647 injuries and car damages of $125 million.

The coalition counsels drivers that it’s safer to hit the deer rather than swerve out of the way and possibly strike a utility pole or another car. Their campaign is titled: “Don’t veer for deer.”

In LivingstonCounty, one of the fastest-growing counties in the state, the number of deer-related wrecks nearly tripled during the 1980s and now hovers between 1,250 and 1,400 a year.

Efforts need to expand

Michigan officials, who reassess the deer population every five years, said past efforts to thin the herd haven’t gone far enough.

They’ve offered tax breaks to landowners to open their property to hunters and introduced a late firearms season to hunt deer without antlers. Such deer tend to be female, so their deaths help reduce the progeny.

But many hunters prefer the more macho chasing of the bucks — the more points, the better.

Earl Flegler, a wildlife habitat biologist with the DNR, said new measures to reduce deer could include more hunting seasons, longer seasons, split seasons that allow more opening days, more incentives to hunt antlerless deer and more marketing to encourage hunting.

“These options may include opening all harvest seasons (late firearm, muzzleloader, regular firearm, archery, youth and special disable firearm hunt),” Flegler wrote in a draft report.

Huron-Clinton Metroparks, which operates 13 parks in southeast Michigan, had such a problem with deer in 1999 that it hired sharpshooters to reduce the number.

In other states, Minnesota recently extended its hunting season by an additional week and introduced hunts at seven state parks targeting female deer. Pennsylvania boosted the number of deer killed by 25 percent after extending the season to hunt female deer by nine days in 2000.

You can reach Francis X. Donnelly at (313) 223-4186 or fdonnelly@detnews.com.

[brdhntr]

Simple solution. If those soccer moms don't want to see a deer bleeding in their driveway, they have two choices:

1) Deal with the deer, and no more complaints about damage from them.

2) They foot the bill for removal.

Easy to do, go from door to door and ask if you would allow a hunter to remove problem deer. Take the number of no's, and divide the total cost of removal by that number. Then hand each one a bill. I'm tired of my tax and wildlife money going to people who won't tolerate a simple, viable solution. Same goes for geese and the egg oiling/shaking program.

[farmlegend]

Simple solution. If those soccer moms don't want to see a deer bleeding in their driveway, they have two choices:

1) Deal with the deer, and no more complaints about damage from them.

2) They foot the bill for removal.

Not that simple. The reality is they have more choices than that.

I share your antipathy for the attitudes of some of the "soccer moms". However, don't lose sight of the fact that they have more time on their hands than you or I do, and just as many votes. These folks are more than willing to put up with a few incremental car/deer accidents and replacing separate shrubbery (who cares, it's just the 'ol man's money, right?) as long as they are spared the thought of a "hunter" putting a bleeding, blatting doe on their lawn. Next up will be a gruesome pic in the local newspaper.

Plus, these ladies just love those marauding deer. You should see the reaction of guests in our home when a half-dozen of the hooved varmints traipse across my grounds. To say that they "fawn" over the deer causes one to reflect on the origin of the word.

I'd say, write a check to the sharpshooter firm and be done with it.

[brdhntr]

-snip
I share your antipathy for the attitudes of some of the "soccer moms". However, don't lose sight of the fact that they have more time on their hands than you or I do, and just as many votes. These folks are more than willing to put up with a few incremental car/deer accidents and replacing separate shrubbery (who cares, it's just the 'ol man's money, right?) as long as they are spared the thought of a "hunter" putting a bleeding, blatting doe on their lawn. Next up will be a gruesome pic in the local newspaper.
-snip
I'd say, write a check to the sharpshooter firm and be done with it.

That's exactly what I want. I could care less if they don't allow hunting, but if they don't, they have to pay the price. I refuse to use the Metro parks for the very reason that they are playing these games. Would much rather spend my time and money in Rec areas where they allow hunting.