It's not the deer, it's us.
Too many deer, fewer trees, less water
Email to a friend who sent me a link to a website about deer and the environment:
Although there seems to be no group claiming this website (could chase the URL to find out) https://saveforestseatvenison.com/ there is one reference to New Jersey. They have a pine barrens to protect their aquifer, with Long Island’s Pine Barrens being crucial to our sole-source aquifer as well.
These are the DEC-written recommendations for deer overpopulation. https://extapps.dec.ny.gov/docs/wildlife_pdf/deerplan21.pdf Section 8, page 79, Recommendations
A team of 12 of us spent 18 months in 2021-2022 getting these suggestions moved from the Town of Southold (deer program) to Suffolk County to New York State Assembly and Senate, and we got the hunting laws changed, a process which just saw the governor sign in 2023. They apply to all of New York.
The estimated carrying capacity of deer (~12/square mile) population in the 40-square-mile town of Southold is 500. The population is about 2500. Without natural predators, human beings are responsible for their ‘management.’ Their greatest predator is the 2019 Buick. The understory is decimated, successional forest is failing, the older trees are not just aging out but now that we have the Emerald Ash Borer and southern Pine Bark Beetle, the woodlands are diseased, dying, drying out and now pose a severe fire hazard in the Pine Barrens.
The pests are coming from the south as our temperatures are rising—see both the USDA, NYS Ag and Forests and the Burpee Seed Company to verify the changes in the Hardiness Growing Map—Long Island is now a 7b where even 10 years ago we were a 7a. The heat is coming north at a noticeable rate of speed.
Without a thoughtful, scientific, strict and enforceable tree code, developers are felling our woodland habitats to the detriment of wildlife, soil habitat and creating a disruption of the water cycle without anyone being the wiser.
This is a complex set of issues with an identifiable list of Root Causes, but even with this quick glance we can see that any development requires smart growth which would prevent further suburban sprawl. Your suggestion to use the website on eating venison is actually a set of recommended actions which assigns us responsibility for keeping the deer population at carrying capacity for a particular locale.
We have many other tools which give us the guidance to restore the balance which the planet herself will achieve if we become partners in the systems and communities of life that will regenerate naturally to health over a short period of time—Climate Action Plans, Climate Smart Communities, Clean Energy Communities, the science of Drawdown and a good bit more. But overall we can take advantage of a hundred Nature-based Solutions which have worked for 300,000 years.
The time to start using these tools is now.
Mk