Feb 8, 2023 07:12 PM
https://hakaimagazine.com/features/givin...-the-boot/
EXCERPT: Columbian black-tailed deer range from southern British Columbia to Southern California, and as far east as the Cascade Range and southern Sierra Nevada. They are native to this archipelago.
They are also wildly out of balance. By the late 1800s, foreign settlers had exterminated the islands’ cougars and wolves, the deer’s primary predators, and alienated Indigenous people from their traditional deer hunting grounds. Over the past century, wildlife managers here and across the continent encouraged the proliferation of all deer species—popular game animals.
More recently, changes in regulations and cultural attitudes have resulted in a dramatic drop in hunting. Deer have never had it so easy. Martin estimates that their population on the islands is now 10 times what it was before colonists arrived.
Here and there, oceanspray shoots up like topiary umbrellas. Indigenous people used these flowering shrubs, also known as ironwood, for making tools and utensils. Well past two meters tall, these specimens are old-timers, Martin explains, up to 100 years in age, that have been relentlessly clipped and shaped by deer who swim between islands.
Few, if any, new oceanspray plants survive because deer eat them before they can establish. It’s the same for other bushes and flowering plants. Seedling and sapling trees often meet a similar fate.
Native deer prefer to browse native fare, especially succulent flowering plants, giving unpalatable invasive plant species an edge. Gone too are the native, perennial, tussock-forming grasses that some birds favor for nesting. What the deer leave behind is an impoverished understory dotted with moss and thorny Himalayan blackberry. And the evidence of deer overbrowsing reaches well beyond the trees.
Martin leads me to a meadow near the beach where the sun illuminates a grassy field of vibrant green. While I take in the inviting scene, she conjures a vanished world of purples and pinks, the trill and hum of pollinating birds and bees—the way this meadow used to be.
Martin grew up just 22 kilometers north of here, on Saltspring Island, in the 1970s. “There were places you could be knee-deep in wildflowers,” she recalls. Now, with the proliferation of deer, development, and other stressors, “those places are long gone.”
They’ve been replaced by a carpet of invasives, including European orchard grass. It’s a process repeated throughout the archipelago, she says, and wherever overabundant deer are found.
[...] Both Indigenous knowledge and Western science have long recognized that deer can have big impacts wherever their predators are few, causing a trophic cascade—the ecological term for changes throughout a food web...
[...] Tara Martin has been studying the effects of overabundant deer for more than 15 years. ... While her work has helped establish that overabundant deer are threatening the local ecosystem, she suspects the effects could also reach beyond this place...
[...] In the forests of Wisconsin and Michigan, research suggests, expanding whitetail populations are responsible for at least 40 percent of the change observed in forest structure...
[...] Wildlife agencies in North America still rely largely on hunting licenses for revenue. But as fewer young people are taking up hunting, and hunting becomes less popular in many regions, that model is becoming unsustainable—both as a revenue generator, and for deer numbers in areas where wild predators haven’t recovered
North America is not alone in facing the challenges posed by overabundant deer. It’s a similar story in the United Kingdom, Finland, and Japan.
[...] One of the most ecologically sound approaches, depending on the available habitat, is to reintroduce or support the recovery of native predator populations...
[...] One thing is clear: it’s unethical to do nothing. “If you’re worried about ecosystems,” Palmer says, “it seems like that’s a reason to reduce the deer population. If you’re worried about human welfare, given the ways we live, it seems like that’s a reason to reduce the deer population. If you’re worried about animal welfare, it seems like that’s a reason to reduce the deer population.” (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: Columbian black-tailed deer range from southern British Columbia to Southern California, and as far east as the Cascade Range and southern Sierra Nevada. They are native to this archipelago.
They are also wildly out of balance. By the late 1800s, foreign settlers had exterminated the islands’ cougars and wolves, the deer’s primary predators, and alienated Indigenous people from their traditional deer hunting grounds. Over the past century, wildlife managers here and across the continent encouraged the proliferation of all deer species—popular game animals.
More recently, changes in regulations and cultural attitudes have resulted in a dramatic drop in hunting. Deer have never had it so easy. Martin estimates that their population on the islands is now 10 times what it was before colonists arrived.
Here and there, oceanspray shoots up like topiary umbrellas. Indigenous people used these flowering shrubs, also known as ironwood, for making tools and utensils. Well past two meters tall, these specimens are old-timers, Martin explains, up to 100 years in age, that have been relentlessly clipped and shaped by deer who swim between islands.
Few, if any, new oceanspray plants survive because deer eat them before they can establish. It’s the same for other bushes and flowering plants. Seedling and sapling trees often meet a similar fate.
Native deer prefer to browse native fare, especially succulent flowering plants, giving unpalatable invasive plant species an edge. Gone too are the native, perennial, tussock-forming grasses that some birds favor for nesting. What the deer leave behind is an impoverished understory dotted with moss and thorny Himalayan blackberry. And the evidence of deer overbrowsing reaches well beyond the trees.
Martin leads me to a meadow near the beach where the sun illuminates a grassy field of vibrant green. While I take in the inviting scene, she conjures a vanished world of purples and pinks, the trill and hum of pollinating birds and bees—the way this meadow used to be.
Martin grew up just 22 kilometers north of here, on Saltspring Island, in the 1970s. “There were places you could be knee-deep in wildflowers,” she recalls. Now, with the proliferation of deer, development, and other stressors, “those places are long gone.”
They’ve been replaced by a carpet of invasives, including European orchard grass. It’s a process repeated throughout the archipelago, she says, and wherever overabundant deer are found.
[...] Both Indigenous knowledge and Western science have long recognized that deer can have big impacts wherever their predators are few, causing a trophic cascade—the ecological term for changes throughout a food web...
[...] Tara Martin has been studying the effects of overabundant deer for more than 15 years. ... While her work has helped establish that overabundant deer are threatening the local ecosystem, she suspects the effects could also reach beyond this place...
[...] In the forests of Wisconsin and Michigan, research suggests, expanding whitetail populations are responsible for at least 40 percent of the change observed in forest structure...
[...] Wildlife agencies in North America still rely largely on hunting licenses for revenue. But as fewer young people are taking up hunting, and hunting becomes less popular in many regions, that model is becoming unsustainable—both as a revenue generator, and for deer numbers in areas where wild predators haven’t recovered
North America is not alone in facing the challenges posed by overabundant deer. It’s a similar story in the United Kingdom, Finland, and Japan.
[...] One of the most ecologically sound approaches, depending on the available habitat, is to reintroduce or support the recovery of native predator populations...
[...] One thing is clear: it’s unethical to do nothing. “If you’re worried about ecosystems,” Palmer says, “it seems like that’s a reason to reduce the deer population. If you’re worried about human welfare, given the ways we live, it seems like that’s a reason to reduce the deer population. If you’re worried about animal welfare, it seems like that’s a reason to reduce the deer population.” (MORE - missing details)