There is a little island off the coast of Rhode Island where for years the residents complained about the large deer population and the 'havoc' these animals caused to private property. Shrubs and gardens were eaten up and lawns chewd and stomped. hunters were allowed in every year to 'control' the over-population....here's the result. ( News atricle from Providence Journal)
PRUDENCE ISLAND ��" Late-afternoon shadows darken the boat landing as Joel and Jane Maguire step off the ferry after a day of running mainland errands, and guide their golden retriever into the car for the ride home.
It will take only a few minutes to traverse the dirt roads and crumbled asphalt to the west side; the island wiggles down Narragansett Bay for six miles and is just a mile across at its widest point, the southern end. But where the Maguires live is, in island scale, the frontier.
The other night they had dinner with their entire neighborhood. Everyone showed. Five diners.
Most other evenings the Maguires’ dinner company are of the split-hoof variety. They come bounding over the stone wall and into the backyard whenever Joel clangs his dinner bell. But lately the deer ��" Prudence Island’s endearing and divisive trademark ��" aren’t answering the chow call.
“Usually we’d see deer all along this road,” says Jane on the way home from the ferry landing. “Especially at this hour of the day. You’d have to drive carefully because you’d never know when one might leap out of the woods.”
Joel Maguire pulls into their yard, overlooking the West Passage, and heads out back. He clangs the suspended bell and waits. And waits. He peers into the bordering green thicket where in years past he’s had as many as 23 deer emerge from the thorny brush ��" his own Field of Dreams moments.
“I haven’t seen a deer in two months,” he says.
Where have all the deer gone?
The question is on the minds and lips of many of the island’s 125 year-round residents this winter ��" not to mention a segment of New England deer hunters who, for years, have journeyed to Prudence Island to cull from one of the densest populations of whitetail deer on the East Coast.
Where a density of 20 deer per square mile on the mainland is considered burgeoning, Prudence Island has over the years produced densities easily exceeding 100 deer per square mile.
In such times, a bow hunter on Prudence Island (hunting is limited to bow and arrow) could sit in his tree stand and count 20 or 30 deer passing in a morning, where on the mainland a hunter might go days without spotting a single doe. Seeing so many deer made it worth the logistical hassle and required paperwork of hunting lottery applications and reservations to hunt on the island.
At other times of the year, residents enjoyed the evening pastime of riding around the island counting deer. Families piled into pickup beds would commonly see 60, 70 or 80 deer in an evening.
But so many deer in one place is unhealthy ��" for the deer, the vegetation they gnaw to the ground and the people enjoying their sightings, says state biologist Lori Gibson. About a third of the island’s population has reportedly tested positive for Lyme disease, spread by deer tick bites. Sections of the island’s vegetation have been overgrazed, says Gibson, and the island’s deer herd has suffered periods of starvation.
Those phenomena aren’t being talked about so much though this winter. The talk on ferry crossings and at the shoreside post office is what people aren’t seeing.
Hunters registered 54 deer killed on the island this year ��" the lowest number in 30 years. The low harvest followed a trend. The number of deer killed has been declining since 2004, when hunters took a record number of deer: 360.
Gibson says the declining deer kill reflects the state’s successful managing of the herd. In times when the deer population explodes, the state raises the number of deer that hunters can harvest, and vice versa. This year the state set a target goal of 75.
Gibson notes a similar fluctuation in the deer population occurred in the mid 1990s, when hunters, in response to the skyrocketing population, were allowed to take 250 deer in 1995 and 249 in 1996. By 1998 the island’s deer population dropped and the kill decreased to 55, the lowest number until this past season.
Still, speculation abounds on the island as to what’s really happening this year to the local mascot, which many islanders treat as virtual pets.
Some residents, such as Joel Maquire, advance a conspiracy theory. He says the state wants to rid the island of deer entirely to lower the incidences of tick-borne diseases “and they’ve done a damn good job.” Others wonder whether poachers have taken too many deer.
Still others are pointing fingers of blame at the island’s sneaky new resident who came ashore wet and shaking in recent years: The coyote.
Billy Silvia, 52, a local tradesman and deer hunter, has lived on the island year-round for 22 years and says he began seeing coyotes three years ago. Few believed him then. “Now at night I can hear them yipping from my porch.”
Silvia, who has suffered terribly from Lyme disease that wasn’t quickly detected, raises turkeys, peacocks and exotic fowl on his few acres. He used to shoot two dozen marauding raccoons a year, he says. This year, “I didn’t see one,” a fact he attributes to the coyotes’ well-rounded appetite.
A coyote can’t bring down a healthy deer but it can easily kill a fawn.
“I have never found a baby deer in the middle of the road until this summer,” says Silvia. “I found two fawns. There was no meat left. They took all the meat all out of them.”
The coyotes could be having an impact on the deer herd other than by eating them.
Silvia maintains he watched a small pack of coyotes chase six deer out of the woods on the southern tip of the island and right into the Bay. “They swam off toward Jamestown and never turned back.”
Gibson, the biologist, disputes some of the talk.
The state is “absolutely not” trying to
exterminate deer on the island, she says, but there has been a conscious effort to “realign the population with the available habitat.”
“We can’t support having a population of 70 or 80 [deer] per square mile whether people like to see the deer or not. It would be an injustice to the other animals and the plants and trees necessary to support them. It wouldn’t be a responsible action.”
Gibson is also not yet convinced the coyote population is as big or as troublesome on Prudence Island as some residents believe (though she concedes other Bay islands, such as Jamestown, now have fair shares of the able-swimming canines.)
She refers to the case in Warwick Neck a few years ago when everyone who saw a coyote reported it to the police or wildlife officials. “It sounded like there were hundreds when it was the same coyote.”
Gibson isn’t disputing, however, that people are seeing fewer deer.
“This is the worst year ever,” says Edward Giarrusso, 69, who’s had a summer house on the island for 22 years and Lyme disease three times. He now lives on the island permanently.
“It’s bad,” he says of the vanishing deer. “We like to see the deer around.”
Giarrusso also owns five acres, and each fall invites a few friends over to bow hunt his property. “The first week of hunting season we had six people hunting here, my son and some of his friends, and out of a five-day hunt, I don’t think three deer were seen. I didn’t even take my bow out of the case this year.”
Giarrusso enjoys growing enormous pumpkins. Five years ago he had a 600-pounder rot before he had a chance to pick it. He cut it into pieces and threw the whole thing over his deer-proof fence.
In three days 600 pounds of pumpkin disappeared. “The deer were in there day and night eating that pumpkin.”
This summer Giarrusso threw all his small pumpkins and leaves over the fence. Nothing touched them. Bushels of apples fell from his fruit trees and for the first time in years, rotted on the ground. There were no deer around to eat them. “This is ridiculous.”
Robin Weber, 43, lives on the island and works for the Narragansett Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, which manages the hundreds of acres of state property on the southern tip of Prudence Island.
She thinks the decline in the deer population “is a great thing. Not only does it reduce an incident of tick-born diseases but it also reduces [the deer’s] impact on the environment.”
“One shouldn’t see 10 or 20 deer on their passage across the island. That isn’t normal,” she says. “It is unhealthy no matter how you look at it. What people are seeing now [or not seeing] is a more natural level of animals.”
Gibson isn’t worried about the deer disappearing from the island. The herd numbers fluctuate depending on management decisions. And the deer always rebound quicker than the habitat they damage.
“Even when there were100 [deer] per square mile they were still pumping out triplets,” she says. “You would think if they weren’t in high physical condition they wouldn’t have such a high reproductive rate but we weren’t seeing that.”
Gibson is more concerned about losing the state’s key management tool: the hunters.
Without plentiful deer on Prudence Island to keep them interested, the hunters will likely opt to stay on the Rhode Island mainland, where the density of whitetails, particularly in South County, remains among the highest in New England. That would bode more trouble eventually with overpopulation, overgrazing and disease, she says.
Gibson knows she walks a fine line. Hunters like to hunt the deer. Many island residents love to see the deer (many flaunt the prohibition about feeding them), and still others, particularly the summer residents, worry about the spread of disease and want the deer numbers controlled.
“It’s difficult to please all of the stakeholders,” says Gibson
Back at the Maguires, Joel spends the last hour of daylight driving around the island looking for deer without luck. In their home office, Jane Maguire shows two visitors her husband’s computer screen saver: it is a close-up picture of a young buck, his tall antlers in velvet. The Maguires called him Bony, because when he showed up in the backyard “He was starving to death,” says Joel.
Maguire says sometimes he picks ticks off the deer he feeds. Or once fed.
“I miss my boys.”
