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Eating Themselves Out of House and Home - white-tailed deer of eastern US
National Wildlife, Oct-Nov, 1998
In some areas, exploding populations of white-tailed deer are obliterating layers of woodland habitat; is there a solution?
A cattered clumps are all that remains of the first snowfall in northern Ohio, diminutive pockets of white dotting the woodlands of the Cleveland Metro- parks. Inside a conference room at park headquarters, wildlife biologist Tom Stanley looks wistfully out the windows and imagines a harsher climate, one that would provide a ready solution to a difficult problem.
"Up in Minnesota, they get snow this time of the year that stays on the ground until spring, packed four or five feet deep," he says. But in Ohio, "even in our worst winters, the deer can paw through to grasses and shrubs. You just don't get significant die-offs."
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Not that Stanley has anything against deer. In fact, as chief of natural resources for the parks, he's charged with protecting them. But a seasonal thinning of the herd would help him remedy a situation faced by a growing number of wildlife managers: too many white-tailed deer.
In forests throughout much of the country, and particularly in parks and reserves in the East, white-tailed deer are at record population levels. "We're seeing 30, 40, even 60 deer per square mile almost everywhere now, compared to the 10 to 12 or fewer deer per square mile we believe were here pre-European settlement," says Donald Waller, professor of botany and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Historically a boom-and-bust species, deer are the beneficiaries of a severe drop in predators, such as wolves and mountain lions, and an explosive growth in "edge" areas bordering their woodland habitat--especially suburban backyards brimming with tasty gardens and shrubs. Freed of natural constraints, deer are having a substantial, and in many cases adverse, effect on plants and other animals. They are eating certain trees and shrubs into near oblivion in some areas, in the process obliterating whole layers of habitat.
"I see it as being a very widespread and major problem," says Robert Warren, professor of wildlife ecology and management at the University of Georgia. "There are places that overbrowsing by deer has created situations where, even if the herd is reduced, it may not be sufficient to allow the area to restore itself to its natural state."
In portions of the Cleveland Metroparks (and adjacent Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area) heavily populated by deer, a number of once-common shrubs, vines and flowering plants--woodland asters, goldenrods and rarer species such as trillium and fringed gentian--are in serious decline. Sumacs, stripped of their bark by hungry deer, are rapidly disappearing. Jewelweed, an important food for small birds and mammals, is virtually gone. In some areas, tree seedlings have been browsed so intensely that forest regeneration has ground to a halt.
As a result, both plant and animal species are vanishing from the ecosystem, according to a 1997 vegetational survey of the Cleveland-area parks. Food and cover for many ground-nesting birds and small mammals have disappeared, the report notes. Several small animals, such as chipmunks, are now seldom seen along the trails and bike paths.
A local task force concluded that the most effective way to prevent further damage would be using sharpshooters to remove about 570 deer (from a 1997 population estimated at 8,000, about 37 per square mile). Though relatively small, that number would thin out the most densely populated areas, giving plants and animals there an opportunity to recover. Additional deer harvests would further reduce the population to a projected carrying capacity of 10 to 30 deer per square mile.
Deer culling is not new; park managers from Connecticut to California have used it, often after fencing, relocation or birth-control programs proved impractical. Relocation and fencing are often prohibitively expensive. Birth-control programs, which call for repeated innoculations, are difficult to administer effectively to free-ranging herds. In addition, Stanley points out, government officials have been reluctant to grant approvals for either deer relocation or birth control.
Given the lack of viable alternatives, experts say that hunting is the appropriate choice. "With the absence of large predators, hunting has been the most effective method to keep populations in check," says Doug Inkley, senior scientist for the National Wildlife Federation.
But shooting deer is frequently controversial. In northern Ohio, the hunt was prevented last winter by a court injunction obtained by In Defense of Deer, a grass-roots group opposed to shooting deer for any reason. "It's not a deer problem, it's a people problem," insists Bonnie Vlach, founder and president of the group. "People move into these posh developments alongside the park, then start complaining when the deer come out and eat their shrubs. If you just leave well enough alone, the system will regulate itself."
Stanley disagrees on both counts. "We're not suggesting we need to reduce the deer population because there are too many in people's backyards," he says. "The issue is the damage to the Metroparks, which is so drastic we're losing significant biodiversity. If we let the population go, I think there's ample evidence that the damage will be so great, the forest ecosystem will not recover in a normal person's lifetime."
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