Wanted: More Hunters

Whenever deer irrupt in suburban and urban settings, residents (not just animal-rights zealots) rail against lethal control, demanding immunocontraception and trap-and-transfer. Frequently, they suggest introducing wolves and cougars. After endless testimony and countless hearings, the community solves the problem by inviting in sport hunters or hiring White Buffalo, but not before native ecosystems have been trashed.

Protesters have threatened DeNicola, called him "murderer" and "Taliban," contaminated White Buffalo's bait sites with ammonia and human feces. He has been sued five times, never successfully. Before White Buffalo began culling deer in Princeton, New Jersey, in February 2001, the town's deer-automobile collisions were up to 337 a year, the highest DeNicola has seen in any municipality. Deer were crashing through picture windows and landing in laps, thrashing and gushing blood. Game wardens were patrolling by helicopter to keep people from feeding deer. Animal-rights advocates delayed the cull with lawsuits. They demanded immunocontraception and trap-and-transfer. They drew deer away from DeNicola's bait sites by putting out corn (when he found the illegal bait pile, he set up there, killing 12 more animals). They offered each of 24 landowners $2,000 to kick DeNicola off their property. (None accepted.) They punctured his truck tires. They paraded with placards. They held candlelight vigils for the departed ungulates. DeNicola, who views such antics as normal working conditions, rates the Princeton project "highly successful."

It's hard to imagine contraception ever working in big woods, but it may one day be practical where deer are hemmed in by development--places any sportsman would avoid like a case of Lyme disease. Perfecting a workable delivery system is going to be tough, though. I caught a glimpse of just how tough on December 11, 2001, when one of DeNicola's products--a deer biologist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station--showed me around his research site in the Lake Gaillard watershed, 10 miles east of New Haven. The biologist was Scott Williams--26, dark, solid, 6 feet 8 inches. Late in his academic career Williams had gotten serious about his studies and matriculated at Yale, where he did the fieldwork for his master's under DeNicola--this to the astonishment and delight of his father (me). He and project leader Uma Ramakrishnan are testing a method of sterilizing bucks. Williams shoots deer with a tranquilizer gun, getting good hits on 90 percent of the ones he fires at. Does are fitted with radio and GPS collars. Bucks, which can't wear collars because their necks swell in the rut, are ear-tagged, and a scarring agent is injected into the epididymis (the sperm-producing body next to each testicle). In the animal-rights community, wishful thinking has a way of being expressed as reality; after Ramakrishnan gave a lecture on her study she was appalled to read in the animal-rights literature that she "opposed" lethal control.

While Williams and I were waiting for Ramakrishnan, we patrolled the lakeside road in his truck. Williams keenly understands the dangers of mismanagement. Two years earlier, while he was driving back from monitoring grossly overpopulated deer at Mumford Cove, Connecticut, one leaped in front of this vehicle, doing $4,500 worth of damage. In the southern part of the Lake Gaillard watershed, where we started out, there were now about 100 deer per square mile; in this kind of habitat you start seeing damage at about 15. In a 10-year experiment, the U.S. Forest Service found that at more than 20 deer per square mile you lose your eastern wood pewees, indigo buntings, least flycatchers, yellow-billed cuckoos, and cerulean warblers (on Audubon's WatchList). At 38 deer per square mile you lose eastern phoebes and even robins. Ground nesters like ovenbirds, grouse, woodcock, whippoorwills, and wild turkeys can nest in ferns, which deer scorn, but these birds, too, are vastly reduced, because they need thick cover.

We saw browse lines around cedars and yews. A grove of white pines had been denuded for the first five feet, a sign of true desperation. At every turn deer froze, then bounced away. In much of the watershed there was no understory save moldering ferns and such invading exotics as barberry, wineberry, and winged euonymus, which deer don't like because they didn't evolve with them. Now ecological restoration, if ever it happens, will require not only controlling deer but killing aliens. Woods like this look "lovely" and "parklike" to most people. The public tends to accept large landscapes as they exist in the here and now, not noticing missing parts. Researching his classic series on hunting ("Bitter Harvest," Audubon, May 1979 through March 1980), John Mitchell stopped to interview a deer hunter sitting beside a clearcut in Michigan. Mitchell asked the guy what he thought about the forest practices that had produced it. "What clearcut?" asked the hunter.

"There's No. 22," said Williams. No. 22 is an eight-point buck that he and Ramakrishnan had recently sterilized. Now they were looking to biopsy his epididymis. I rolled down the window. "Put your hand over your left ear," ordered Williams. At the explosion the buck flinched, and the $200, 50-caliber, radio-transmitting dart tranquilized a sugar maple.

"How come all the deer look so good?" I asked Ramakrishnan when we met her near one of the bait sites. She said that they had glutted themselves on a huge acorn crop. The acorns had so distracted the deer that they wouldn't come to the bait for most of the fall--a major setback for the study. Despite the damaged range, the does are in such good condition from the acorns that most will drop twins, speeding the irruption and further blighting the ecosystem.

At 3:45 P.M., Ramakrishnan and I drove Williams to his bait site, because the automatic feeder was set to spew corn at 4:00. Williams climbed to his tree stand, and Ramakrishnan and I left. It was dark when Ramakrishnan's cell phone finally rang. Williams had darted No. 22. It looked like a good hit, he said. Ramakrishnan prepared the scalpel and the sutures, but when Williams unfurled the radio receiver and started tracking the dart's signal, he found it on the ground, barb bent and covered with deer hair. It had bounced off a bone, a small price to pay for not having your scrotum cut open. Despite what hunters read in the hook-and-bullet press, they're not about to be replaced by syringe-wielding biologists.