Winter 2000

by JILL RIDDELL

Photo by Rob Curtis

here's something about deer that epitomizes the wild. Even though next door may be a shopping mall complete with Gap and Starbucks, a deer in a forest preserve transports a visitor away from all of that -- from all that is tame, from all that is ordinary.

Yet can there be too much of a good animal? In Chicago Wilderness, white-tailed deer have become so prolific that large herds threaten healthy natural ecosystems. Chicago WILDERNESS invited five people with expertise on deer to consider where we and the deer now stand. Some participants, originally opposed to deer control, have become convinced that reducing deer numbers is necessary to preserve entire ecosystems. Others, who once regarded deer policy only as a professional question, have come to respect the strong feelings deer evoke for many people.

PARTICIPANTS

Tom Anderson is director of the Save The Dunes Council, a nonprofit organization in northwest Indiana. His involvement in the issue dates back eight years when Indiana's Department of Natural Resources was considering reducing deer herds in state parks, including the Indiana Dunes State Park. Initially, Save The Dunes Council opposed the reduction, but after an in-depth study demonstrated that serious damage was being done to the park's flora, the Council decided to support deer reduction.

Steve Barg is director of education for Lake Forest Open Lands. Previously he was director of the Heller Nature Center in Highland Park and a member of the City of Highland Park's task force on white-tailed deer.

Marty Jones is in charge of the urban deer project for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. He started working on the issue in 1983, conducting an urban deer study for the Illinois Natural History Survey.

Dan Ludwig is the animal ecologist for the DuPage County Forest Preserve District. He first became involved with urban deer in Illinois in 1985, when he rode along on aerial counts to assess relative abundance of deer in northeastern Illinois. After examining data on deer population gathered between 1985 and 1990, the Forest Preserve District decided to set up a study measuring the impact of deer on vegetation.

John Oldenburg, a forest ecologist, was hired in 1992 by the DuPage County Forest Preserve District to administer several natural resource programs, including the deer control program. He believes that, through research, "we gained a lot of insight into what happens to deer and how they move. We believe that we're approaching a level of density that we feel is more in balance with the ecosystem, [where] deer can live in balance with the other organisms."

Jill Riddell is a freelance writer who worked previously as communications director for both Openlands Project and for the Illinois Nature Conservancy. She served as moderator for the discussion.

BACKGROUND

Marty: In Illinois, deer were gone by the turn of the century. Deer were given complete protection from market hunting in 1901. After that, there were even attempts to try and reintroduce deer. In the absence of predators and with complete protection from hunting their numbers rebounded dramatically -- so much so that hunting seasons were opened up beginning in 1956. Today you see estimates for deer numbers in Illinois up to 500,000.

	Photo by Lou Nettlehorst

Steve: When I was a child I never saw deer, and I grew up in a rural area. And when I did see a deer, it was usually up in the north woods of Wisconsin. To me, it symbolized that I was in the wilderness. It was great. We'd all celebrate. How many of us had that experience? Most of us probably.

Even today, I love seeing deer in preserves. It still rings of that feeling, "Oh, we're in the wilderness now." Here is a large grazing mammal that still inhabits the same places that we inhabit. What a wonderful thing!

Jill: I would imagine everybody here had similar experiences, and that's part of why you became interested enough in nature to make it your career. But then things changed?

Steve: In Highland Park, we used to show people a photograph from Ryerson Conservation area in south Lake County. Ryerson put up an eight- or ten-foot wire fence in 1987 called an exclosure that allows movement of a lot of plant-eating mammals but that excludes deer. Anyone can stand there in mid-May and see a marked difference. Inside the exclosure where the deer can't get to it, you'll see lots of flowering plants -- larger plants, and a greater variety of species often times. Outside, you see very few flowers or no flowers at all, much smaller plants and less biodiversity. It's like looking at a garden next to a gravel road.

Tom: The impact of deer has been very substantial on spring wildflowers at Indiana Dunes State Park, where there are something like 30 or 40 rare and threatened species. There is one endangered shinleaf that was reduced from a [fairly large] area down to literally a couple of individual plants.

ECOSYSTEM IMPACT

The issue of whether to cull deer is sometimes falsely described as an argument between "plant people" and "animal lovers. In fact, the heavy grazing of an overly large population of deer affects much more than plant populations.

Tom: Deer don't have an impact just on plants. By devouring many plant species, deer cause other damage to the ecosystem -- to the songbirds, numbers of bird species, ground nesting birds, small mammals, amphibians, on and on. It is important to look at the whole ecosystem, because as we got into the public debate, some people attempted to polarize the debate -- to say "You are either for the plants or you're for deer."

Steve: We had people coming to us saying, "Why don't you just go out and spray all your trillium with Deer Away?" Even if Deer Away is an effective repellent, the idea that we would be able to spray every plant that might be browsed by deer -- they didn't understand that this wasn't a garden.

One of the other things that managers of public land have to talk about that's different than private landowners is that natural areas are under a tremendous amount of pressure. You've got invasive species, changes in water flows and levels, fragmented habitat. You have all these pressures already that you are trying to eliminate if you want to maintain a healthy natural area. And in terms of managing the preserve I was responsible for, even though deer are naturally found there, they were putting as much or more pressure on the ecosystem as an invasive shrub like buckthorn does.

Tom: The animal people most come to see at the state park turns out to be deer. The public perception of deer is a lot different than the public perception of buckthorn. I don't think anyone would have stopped to say, "You shouldn't cut buckthorn."

There were certainly people on the deer task force in Indiana who didn't care what the impacts on the ecosystem were. To them, having more deer was an even higher value, no matter what the impact.

DENSITY OF DEER

How do we know how many deer are too many? Or is it more helpful to measure the health of the ecosystem than to count the deer?

John: A homeowner may like plants, he likes his hyacinths, but he's willing to accept 30 deer per square mile and figures he'll just plant more hyacinths because he knows the deer will eat some of them. His tolerance for lots of deer is going to be higher than the land manager who says we can only deal with six to 10 deer per square mile because of the impacts that were demonstrated in our preserves. And the hunter may like 40 per square mile.

Jill: John, has your goal of the forest preserve's carrying capacity* changed over time?

John: During the reduction phase we were moving down toward a particular density goal. But now that we are starting to see a recovery in populations of various plant species, we're starting to ask more intricate questions about what's going on. We want to know whether the population is in balance, what is the sex ratio, what is the age structure, what is the density for a particular type of prairie versus a savanna.

Marty: I have been emphasizing the point for years that the focus of management programs is not on the deer numbers so much as on healthy habitat. What we're actually trying to accomplish on these sites is to restore the habitat.

John: It was never our idea to put a number to this. When the health of the ecosystem recovers, that's the density at which we would like to sustain the deer population.

Tom: The numbers game was played during our experience too. It was said that we needed to have a number, and we can't do anything until we know the exact number. As anyone knows, it is not an easy task to do a census. It costs money. And it is the ecosystem impact that you're trying to manage for, not necessarily an artificial number.

Steve: We surveyed neighbors; we did surveys in the city newsletter; we made individual phone calls to neighbors; we took a lot of information in.

We had neighbors on two sides of the driveway coming into our preserve. One would call us and complain, "What are you going to do about your deer eating my expensive landscape material?" The other neighbor would say, "How can you consider getting rid of deer?" He fed the deer from a 300-pound corn feeding thing in his backyard.

Jill: Is it fair to say that in your experiences on your various preserves that the public needs to have some kind of a voice in what that carrying capacity is going to be at a given preserve?

Tom: One of the failures of our state agency was that they recognized the problem but they were reluctant to share that information or to go to the public. To have the public be part of the decision-making before decisions were made would have gone a long way toward public acceptance. Instead, they basically made the announcement. The opposition formed. They used this lack of public input or involvement to show how uncaring the DNR was. The media said, "Wow, if this was such an important thing why didn't they come out and tell anyone?"

It took a number of months to undo what was mishandled to begin with. The more information the public understands, the more the public will support sound decisions. The more that the public is cut out of a sound decision, it creates antagonism that doesn't do the issue any good.

Steve: My experience in Highland Park was different than that. We did do a lot of education. We had a lot of public information out ahead of time. We had a deer task force assigned. We had public input. And I think I would speak for almost every person on the deer task force that when that group was dismantled there was more polarization than when we started it three years before.

Jill: Do people who believe in the rights of individual animals respond to the argument that there are other animals dying because of the very high deer population?

Tom: Trying to see the macro picture is difficult sometimes.

Dan: You can try to explain that as a land managing agency our statutory responsibility is to preserve, restore, and restock native flora and fauna. We're not doing our jobs if we let these densities of deer build up at the expense of everything else.

Steve: The common argument is, Why don't we just let nature take its course? I don't know how many times we've all heard that. And the reality is that we've manipulated the environment. We can't let nature take its course. We are part of the natural world.

Jill: How has that argument gone for you, has that been persuasive?

Dan: Certain individuals accept it. But some people are never going to accept it. Because, as Steve said, you are killing an animal. Bottom line.

Steve: There's not a person here today that would want to go out and take any animal unnecessarily, even a wasp nest.

No one is blaming the deer. The deer are just doing what they do naturally. But we also have to 'fess up to say we humans have created this problem. We eliminated predators. We've taken hunting out of the mix. And then to say just let nature take its course? We've created the problem. We need to deal with the problem.

TRANSLOCATION

Moving deer from one location to another is a solution that has been tried in the Chicago Wilderness region. How well has it worked?

Steve: The solution that was proposed and adopted in Highland Park in 1995 and again in 1997 was translocation&emdash;capturing some of the deer and moving them somewhere else. It was more costly than lethal removal, but the people of Highland Park were willing to pay for it. In the end we did transfer 20 deer from Highland Park to a private wildlife reserve.

Out of the 20 deer transferred, 19 made it to the transfer site. That was an extremely high percentage compared to other translocations we were aware of. That part of the process went well. Everyone was excited.

But within a year and a half, there were only eight deer surviving. I talked to the manager of this park, and he said -- I'll never forget this -- he said, "Steve, someone who knows nothing about deer, who has absolutely never seen a deer before, could come and sit on our observation platform and look at the Highland Park deer and look at our resident herd and say, "What's wrong with those deer over there?"

He said they looked unhealthy; they were gangly; they were thin. They never mixed in with the resident herd. Coyotes had gotten in under the fence of this wildlife preserve and had taken eight deer, all of them Highland Park deer. Not one from the resident herd.

Jill: Because the predator will take the weaker animals?

Steve: Yes. The Highland Park deer were isolated from the other herd animals. Then the rest of the deer fell to a virus.

Of the 20 deer that were moved, four years later none are surviving.

Jill: What's a deer's normal life span?

Marty: Does can live up to 16 to 18 years. We've documented that locally.

Steve: Most of these animals were younger deer that were easily trapped.

Marty: Their survival is so low because you are essentially turning them into an area they are not familiar with. [In free-range situations] you would be dumping these animals out in an area that's already occupied by deer. They are just going to get bumped along by the resident animals that have already set up territories.

Steve: There should be an understanding that translocation of deer as a viable option to protect an animal's rights isn't really happening. You're not protecting an animal's rights by putting it in a completely foreign area under stress, removed from family or herd. It's not what we would consider a humane option.

IMMUNOCONTRACEPTION

Injecting does with some form of birth control is one option that is often recommended. The participants discussed the current state of knowledge and technology of wild deer immunocontraception.

Steve: There was a park in Columbus, Ohio, called Sharon Woods. They had a little bit different situation from ours in Highland Park in that they had a pen set up on-site as a temporary holding area for the deer. At the time, there was a two-shot immunization, and the shots had to take place within a week or two of each other. And so the most efficient way to do that was to actually capture the deer, inoculate them once and hold them for a week or 10 days, inoculate them again, tag them and release them. But it was not successful. The Sharon Woods information that we got back was that even among the ones that were successfully inoculated, 50 percent of them had twins the following year.

There were questions of whether the inoculation was delivered correctly. And then the other problem was just the mechanics involved of capturing deer, holding them, inoculating them twice, releasing them, and having to do that every year. The labor involved was enormous.

Marty: They have been working with bio-bullets, which are essentially a plastic bullet that you shoot into the animal that would have a compound implanted in the bullet, and it would slowly dissolve over time in the animal's tissues. The dose would be released over time so managers wouldn't have to give a booster shot every year. But once again, it's really experimental.

John: There's some hope along the lines of immunocontraceptives, but it's a long way off from its practical application and maintenance.

LETHAL REMOVAL

Killing deer has proved the only viable solution so far to reducing excess populations of deer. The majority of the programs that harvest deer donate the meat to food pantries.

John: When you're in a reduction phase, the idea is to get the population down. We wanted to be able to surgically shoot an animal to incur rapid death.

Jill: Is there any way to turn the shooting of the deer into a positive cultural experience? In many parts of the state, deer hunting is a rite of passage for young men and to some extent young women. It's part of the culture.

John: There's no sense of community to the earth anymore. You see the problem in the schools -- if you have talked to teachers, the kids think they get their cereal from a store. Everything comes from the store. That's part of the educational challenge we have.

Jill: Maybe there would be an opportunity down the line to restore that. It's not so much introducing hunting as sport as it is introducing ritual. Death is a part of life. And taking a deer's life honorably and with respect is different from some people's image of deer hunting.

John: During the reduction phases you really have to question the efficacy of that choice, because what we're doing is not hunting. It is a clear reduction of the number of animals, and it's not a hunting situation at all. You would be hard-pressed to hunt Waterfall Glen in DuPage County down to the level of deer the ecosystem can sustain. We'd still be sitting on the explosive side of birth rate at this point.

ENCOURAGING AND REINTRODUCING NATURAL PREDATORS

Deer have swung out of balance with respect to the rest of the ecosystem because human beings have eliminated the wolves, wild cats, and bears that would once have kept the population in balance. The group discussed the role of natural predators.

Marty: The phenomenon of increasing coyote numbers seems to be a regional phenomenon. We get more and more reports from different municipalities along the North Shore seeing more and more coyotes.

I've heard reports about some of the Cook County preserves, that they feel they are not seeing as many fawns in some of the areas. We have also had instances in municipalities where deer have been taken down by coyotes in people's yards.

John: Some of the recent studies on DuPage forest preserves indicate a predation by coyotes on pre-weaned fawns anywhere from 20 percent to even 80 percent.

We're interested in any type of natural predator/prey relationship that does occur, because it would weigh heavily into the model that we put together with respect to how many deer need to be culled.

Dan: The coyote is another opportunity to educate the urban public. Not everybody's enchanted with the idea of coyotes in their backyards.

And I wouldn't anticipate a drastic decrease in deer, because even if there's, say, 15 percent fawn mortality, you still got 85 percent, and you still have an increase in the population.

Jill: Are there any other predators that would help reduce the number of deer?

Tom: Mountain lions, but that's not realistic.

Marty: Reintroduction of predators is probably not a viable option.

Proposal for a region-wide approach

To date, scores of towns, counties, and other governments have had to struggle alone with the deer issue. This discussion proposes that a unified approach could help facilitate consensus and wise solutions.

Marty: We've gone through the litany of alternatives time and time again. It boils down to essentially a couple of options, both of which are lethal. We can hunt deer in our parks and preserves in a controlled fashion or use a sharp-shooting program.

Jill: Is there any way we can come to some sort of a region-wide solution to this problem instead of everybody having to go through an identical kind of process of wrestling with their individual deer problems? Is there any way for a broader solution so that somebody in St. Charles isn't going to have to go through the same thing that Highland Park has already gone through?

Dan: I would hope Chicago Wilderness would take the lead. Somebody has to pull it all together and set a standard protocol for a program like this. Then when a land manager at a village board meeting is asked, "Who approves?" We can answer, "The Chicago Wilderness partners approve of it. These people have all done it, and here's how it's set up."

This leadership, whoever assumes it, can also articulate the reasons for deer control. It needs to be clear why it's important from an ecosystem perspective, from a land manager's perspective, and from a homeowner's perspective.

Tom: Utilize the expertise. Don't let there be another community where they have to start from scratch and bring people in and spend the money when you have the expertise available here and people have been through it.

Valuing other people's personal perspectives is important, even if you may not agree with them.

With this issue, people are really concerned about something. They're concerned about nature. You build on that caring and find common ground.