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Help the Environment, Kill Lots More Deer.... Please!
Landscape Architects: Deer Are Designing Future Look of Forests Abundant Whitetails Munch Through the Underbrush; 'Like the Serengeti Plain'From the Wall Street Journal. Subscription required, so here's the whole thing.... I saw a little of what deer can do in the little 5 acre nature preserve I managed for several years for my children's elementary school PTA - wildflowers devoured as soon as the buds opened, few bushes except Chinese/Bush honeysuckle and a few other exotic invaders. We only had a 6-deer herd living in the preserve, and coyotes had been seen there by some of the school's neighbors. The deer rose out of a distant swamp before dawn to browse in a hay field on a recent day. Then, as the sun came up, they made their way into a hillside forest, looking for concealment. But the forest offered few hiding places. It has lots of tall, mature conifers and hardwoods, some 100 years old. Under them, virtually nothing grows -- no seedlings, no saplings, no bushes, and only a few ferns. The floor of this forest, like others around the country, has been stripped clean by whitetail deer. It's deer-hunting season across the land -- a time when Americans are reminded that bountiful whitetails have their costs. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said earlier this month that animal-vehicle crashes, mostly involving deer, killed more than 200 people last year and caused an estimated $1 billion-plus in property damage. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says deer cause more than $400 million in yearly crop damage, not including home gardens and ornamental shrubbery. But below the radar of most people, whitetails have been eating their way toward a more lasting legacy: They are wreaking ecological havoc in forests across the nation. They have become de facto forest managers, determining today what many forests will look like 100 years from now, say forest experts. "Deer have stopped the regeneration of our forests in many areas," says Peter Pinchot, a Yale-educated director of the 1,400-acre Milford Experimental Forest on the Poconos Plateau in Pennsylvania. That means little trees aren't growing up to eventually replace big trees. Example: oaks. Deer love acorns. Surviving acorns sprout seedlings. Deer love them, too. Surviving seedlings become saplings. Deer strip them of leaves and bark. They die. Result: no young oaks. Deer also love hickory and white ash, and eschew black birch, American beech and black locust. If they get hungry enough, they'll eat almost anything, and their victims aren't just trees. Posted by: trailing wife 2004-12-01 |
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