Deer are adorable creatures. They touch so many warm spots in our hearts.
You see a deer grazing in an open field — even if it’s your neighbor’s back yard — and you feel closer to nature. It represents the wilderness in suburbia — or in the city, if you live near Rock Creek Park.
The reality of Odocoileus virginianus in urban America is not so innocuous and cuddly. Bambi can be a varmint.
The fields and forests of yore were perilous places. There were predators, such as mountain lions and coyotes and wolves and foxes — and humans. In that natural setting, predators could control the deer population. Now they are threatened by what — cats and dogs? The occasional hunter in a limited season?
The grim reality of overflowing deer herds is bloody. Drive along a country road or a suburban stretch and you are likely to see dead deer on the roadside. Deer ram into cars, crash through windshields, cause drivers to swerve. We hear less about conflict with the deer herd in the nation’s capital. We who live within range of Rock Creek Park can attest to the odd site of yearlings roaming through our urban wilderness. More than once I have seen a few deer hanging out at the bus stop at the corner ofMcKinley Street and 32nd Street as if they were waiting for the E-2.
Deer in Rock Creek Park were rare before the turn of the 20th century, according to a Deer Management Plan up for review by the National Park Service. No one even bothered to count them before 1960. Now there are 87 deer per square mile, the park service says. The park’s 3,000 acres amount to about four and a half square miles. That adds up to about 350 deer.
For us residents near the park, the deer can be an amusing nuisance; they eat our hostas. But for the park service naturalists, the deer are putting the park out of natural balance. “Action is needed at this time to address the potential of deer becoming the dominant force in the park’s ecosystem,” the management study says, “and adversely impacting native vegetation and other wildlife, a decline in tree seedlings” and much more. In short, the deer are eating the park.
In a pure and natural system, the deer would run out of food and starve, or die from disease, or get culled by predators. The park service has proposed four alternatives: Do nothing; fence the deer and sterilize them; hire sharpshooters to kill some, capture and euthanize others; combine the last two and both sterilize and kill.
The park service has been hiring sharpshooters to kill deer in Gettysburg and other parks, but to my knowledge, shooting deer in Rock Creek would be the first time for a city park.
The park service is holding a public meeting at 6:30 p.m., this Wednesday, at the Rock Creek Park Nature Center.
I’m with the park service on this one; something tells me the animal rights folks and Bambi lovers might not cotton to the bloodshed.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected]
