David Glei has a close relationship with white-tailed deer.
Much too close. On his Michigan farm, deer have browsed up
and down his rows of sweet corn and melon crops as well as
in his orchards. Damage to the sweet corn alone has cost
Glei $900 an acre.
While pruning apple orchards in the winter, Glei has faced
down as many as 100 deer within a football's throw. The
critters have consumed 6,000 to 7,000 bushels of production
from those orchards.
"The only way way to control deer like that is with a
helicopter and hand grenades," says a frustrated Glei. "The
economic losses have been pretty high."
Though he jokes about the grenades, the cost to ward off
deer is no laughing matter. Glei has spent $22,000 for
electronic dog fences and deer-chasing huskies, which have
managed, if not resolved, his problems.
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Deer may be beautiful to watch and fun to hunt, but for
farmers, ranchers and home gardeners they have become pest
No. 1 in much of the country. They cost farmers $500 million
in lost production each year.
In Michigan, the deer population is so large that the state
Farm Bureau is on the verge of suing the state. The deer
there not only destroy crops, but are spreading tuberculosis
to cattle herds. That has become a huge problem. Michigan
has tested 1 million head of cattle and has destroyed 5,000
animals. Twenty-six families have lost their entire
herds.
Livestock losses in Michigan are put at $156 million.
Testing costs another $46 million.
"Enough is enough," says Wayne Wood, the Michigan Farm
Bureau president. His group is demanding better control of
deer numbers and reimbursement for losses and control.
Though landowners are overwhelmed with the increase in deer,
this has been quite a victory for the whitetail, an animal
once on the verge of being eliminated from the American
landscape.
Around the turn of the last century, overhunting had cut the
number of deer to a mere 350,000. But under protective
hunting laws the whitetail came thundering back. The herd
stands today at 31 million-possibly more than when Europeans
first set foot on the continent 500 years ago.
White-tailed deer are found in every state except Nevada.
And the animals are now so plentiful that they may be
supporting a rebound of some natural predators. In Iowa,
deer are partially behind the reappearance of cougars, not
seen in that state for 100 years.
Unlike many wild-animal species that go deeper into the
woods or brush at the site of humans, deer move right in
with us. These animals find farm fields irresistible. But
even on smaller acreages and in suburban areas, deer are so
common that in some parts of the country tall deer fences
and gates enclose the close-cropped lawns and gardens of
upscale homes.
Homeowners, many of whom actually feed the deer, lose $250
million each year in landscaping trees, shrubs and
ornamental plants. Timber losses top $1 billion a year.
Larry Gnewikow is the forester for the 7,000-acre Amana
forest in Iowa, a working forest where harvesting is offset
with new plantings. He says replanted trees take a beating
from deer.
Gnewikow has a place he calls "show 'n tell." It's a 50- x
50-foot, fenced-in area. Inside the enclosure the trees are
10 feet tall. Outside, trees planted at the same time are 3
feet tall.
And because the fence wasn't put up until four years ago,
all the trees had been open to deer. So even the 10-foot
trees are small, considering they were planted in 1988.
White-tailed deer also cause many a headache-and even
heartache-in the case of auto deaths. Deer and cars collide
a million times each year. The result is $1.1 billion in
damages, 29,000 injuries and 200 deaths.
By far, hunting is the best way to control deer, and
Americans do a lot of it. But a quiet revolution is
occurring in deer-hunting circles: Federal and state
officials want hunters to go after does.
Generations of hunting Americans have been told, "You don't
kill does. Real men only kill bucks," says Kurt VerCauteren
of the USDA's Wildlife Services' National Wildlife
Center.
It's an attitude held over from the days when deer were more
scarce and it made sense to take bucks and preserve the
does.
That makes less sense today, notes Tony DeNicola of White
Buffalo Inc., a firm that offers sharp-shooting services for
communities wanting to control deer. He criticizes the near
lust among hunters for a buck. And the media gets into the
game too, promoting the taking of the trophy buck.
"The (traditional) hunt doesn't keep the population stable,"
says DeNicola. Not when it is common for does to birth
twins, if not triplets.
Some states are bucking the "no doe hunting" trend.
Pennsylvania issued more than 1 million licenses for does
this past hunting season. And Wisconsin established the Earn
a Buck program, which requires hunters to take antlerless
deer before they can shoot a buck.
"It's a powerful program," says Scott Craven, a wildlife
specialist with the University of Wisconsin. "But it's not
popular with the hunters."
The problem-from the hunters' point of view, anyway-is that
they simply like seeing lots of deer. "Hunters have gotten
spoiled," DeNicola says. "They start getting used to seeing
10 to 20 deer a day. They won't stand for fewer, even if the
number is more sustainable."
Ted Masser, who works with Texas Parks and Wildlife, takes
an entirely different attitude toward deer on his 930-acre
ranch. Living in the middle of the highest deer
concentration in the U.S. (some areas hold more than 300
deer to the square mile), this Texas Hill Country rancher
erected 8-foot-high fencing around his entire ranch, trapped
a few hundred deer inside and now sells packaged hunts to
anyone willing to pay for a trophy buck.
Business opportunity or not, Howard Myers just wants to be
rid of some deer. The Princeton, Penn., farmer is overrun
with the animals and is frustrated with local opposition to
a sharp-shooting program by DeNicola to thin the herds.
Myers expresses the mood of many landowners when he asks,
"Does the place have to look like the Chicago Stockyards
before they admit there is a problem?"