If you have noticed more deer darting across roads or wandering through your yard lately, you are not imagining things. Fall is when these animals are most active and visible.
Tony DeNicola is the founder and CEO of White Buffalo Inc., a nonprofit wildlife management group that has provided services worldwide and right here in our region. WSHU's Sabrina Garone spoke with him to learn more.
WSHU: What makes your approach different, and what are some of the biggest misconceptions that the public has about your work, do you think?
TD: Well, I think people believe that there's a competition or conflict with recreational hunting, and in reality, the reason we exist is that we address deer in environments where hunting just isn't effective or feasible. So when you get into these really residential areas on the shoreline of Connecticut or, you know, throughout Long Island, a lot of these areas are densely developed. There are setbacks for hunting around these areas, and it's often just challenging in general, having enough hunting pressure to manage the abundance of deer.
WSHU: In our listening area specifically — Connecticut and Long Island — how have deer populations changed over the last few decades? I understand there's been an uptick in car accidents involving deer — is that just something that's seasonal or is this signaling a larger change over time?
TD: There's clearly been a, a long term change in deer abundance in the region, and that started back in the 70s and 80s when deer were fairly scarce, which is hard for most people to believe. Now, because there's limited predation by humans and wild animals, the population has just grown. What people also often think is they live in the wild — and they do live in the wild, but they also very much appreciate living in your backyard because there's abundance of food and it's a safe area for them to live, right? So that increase in deer also ties in with increase in deer-vehicle collisions, and as you'd expect, there's been a corresponding increase in tick-borne diseases. Many of the ticks that are present in our area use deer as their primary host.
WSHU: Could you go into that a little bit more? I think most people would say, 'oh, more deer, that's a good thing, that's signaling, you know, the environment is doing well!' But you know, why not? And not even just deer, other animal populations — if there's an abundance of too much of one thing. Could you just explain why that might be a bad thing?
TD: It just often can create conflicts, you know, with our daily lives, right? Whether that's raccoons living in your attic, or an overabundance of deer, or bears now becoming more common in the state of Connecticut, and they're just trying to survive, right? They need to forage this time of year, and the deer are trying to reproduce.
That's where deer-vehicle conflicts increase because the deer just aren't paying attention. I always give people the analogy of, you know, a child chasing a ball down the driveway in the traffic. They can have a single-dimensional focus, and they're not looking both ways. This time of year, when deer are breeding, that risk really escalates at all times of day. You'd think conventionally dawn and dusk, which is still relevant, but deer are now active throughout the day and night because the males are trying to have breeding opportunities.
WSHU: Could you expand on that a little bit more, like what is happening for deer behaviorally during this time of the year? And also, is there a reason that they like to hang out so close to the road? Sometimes I take a drive and I'm like, 'gosh, you have a whole forest you can go to and you're right next to the highway!' Can you explain why that is?
TD: Well, other than the fact they're showing themselves off, deer are what we call edge species. Where the sun hits the ground, that's where there's gonna be forage available to them. When you're in the forest, the sunlight is often intercepted by the canopy of the trees. That's why you see them along the highways like the Merit Parkway, because there are those big grassy strips, right? The same thing happens in your backyard. You put a house in, you remove a lot of the trees, you have open grass, you have landscape plants, and that's again where the sun reaches the ground, and those plants are at the accessible level for deer.
We're almost in the peak breeding season for deer. The female deer come into estrus, but it's driven by the amount of sunlight. So as our days are getting shorter, the testosterone in the males starts to increase, and then at this time, the reproductive cycle of females is kind of synchronized. A vast majority of females will come into estrus ready to breed in the first two weeks of November, and that corresponds with the male's high level of testosterone. So they're both really focused on one thing, and that keeps them from being as cautious and aware of their surroundings, because the males are just aggressively chasing females, and both the female and the male are so preoccupied that road crossings tend to increase just through that sheer amount of activity.
WSHU: Do we have any idea of how many deer are actually out there and is there a perfect number or a sweet spot for deer living in suburban areas? Is there a target that we're looking for?
TD: Trying to estimate deer abundance is a fool's error! Those guesses are pretty much worthless. But it's kind of at this stage, especially in our region, where very infrequently will reach what we call biological carrying capacity, where they've eaten everything in the forest, there's no food, their health deteriorates, and the health of the forest is substantially compromised. What we typically run into in these developed areas is what we call cultural carrying capacity, where people just get sick of the deer, right? Everyone gets sick of the deer at a different level — individually, in communities. I've been in communities that are tolerant of 100 deer per square mile, and then I've been in areas where we were doing a surgical sterilization program, down in Virginia, and they had less than 20 deer per square mile, and in their mind, there were too many. So it really is by a community perspective on how many deer they're comfortable with.
WSHU: And just to get back to Connecticut and Long Island specifically, what is the remedy for this part of the country? Is it just too suburban to have these deer culling efforts going on? I know Long Island, there's been one on Fire Island and the Town of Southold, I believe, but I mean, what's the best way to combat this in our region, do you think?
TD: Look at the density of development as a spectrum. In that spectrum, there are different techniques that work better than others. So if you're in, as you said, the big woods, because there are such large areas of land, hunting is the preferred method for general, statewide, or region-wide population management. But then, within those broader areas, as the housing density increases and hunting becomes less effective, you start going into professional culling. That's why we started doing this over 30 years ago, because we saw these areas or state agencies came to us and had areas where they couldn't effectively hunt. As the neighborhoods get even more densely developed and you still have deer present, then we start looking at some of these truly unconventional methods, which is something like fertility control, either with vaccines or surgical methods to inhibit reproduction. And of course, you're not immediately reducing a deer population through fertility control, but we have proven that over time, you can get substantial population reductions simply by inhibiting reproduction.
WSHU: What does that look like exactly? Is that like shooting them with a dart or something? I'm totally naïve to this! What does that involve?
TD: We have to get them in hand first, right? They're not very cooperative creatures! You can either physically restrain them, which we use various capture mechanisms, but then ultimately, once they're in hand, you want to chemically sedate them. If you're not gonna use what we call a physical straight approach, which would be a trap, then we do use darts.
We use chemical immobilization, so you can administer an anesthetic drug or a cocktail of drugs into the animal with a dart, and they'll be sleeping on the ground in probably four to six minutes. Then you can either inject them with a vaccine or you can do a surgical procedure.
And good or bad, you know, I was having conversations back at the start of my PhD, and folks were trying to advance vaccine technology, and I remember sitting around with the leading experts laughing at how ridiculous it would be to sterilize wild deer surgically. And that's exactly what we're doing 30 years later! They haven't developed any overly effective vaccines. Can you affect one animal, or can you affect the population? From our perspective, we need to affect the population and the challenge with the vaccine. Just like COVID — everyone's like, 'oh, we're getting a COVID vaccine,' but then you need a booster, and then you need another booster. You have to do the same thing with deer. Imagine getting a handle on a deer once, then trying to get it another or 3 times before you can have a long-term impact on its reproductive viability.
WSHU: Are you guys involved at all with the deer calling efforts on Fire Island? Do I have that correct?
TD: We've been working on Fire Island, I think, for 5 years now. We work with several national parks, and again, those types of environments can be challenging to hunt just because of the extensive amount of public activity. That's where we can work at night, which you don't hunt at night, so we can work around visitors much more effectively than you can with a recreational hunt. What we call sharp shooting is taking it hunting to the next level, where you have much more highly trained people. The whole notion of hunting is that it's supposed to be what they call fair chase, where the animal has the opportunity to evade the hunter. So it's more of a game, where for us it's work. In order to keep costs to a minimum, we need to have optimal efficiency. We will use bait to attract deer to areas that may be safer, might be more discreet, and then we only shoot those animals in the center of the brain — technically a form of euthanasia. There's no suffering. And then all those deer are donated to food pantries and soup kitchens to feed the needy.
Conservationists with White Buffalo Inc. use chemical immobilization, or darting, to safely restrain deer for sterilization procedures.
WSHU: How do you address some of those emotional reactions from the public? What would you say to residents who don't understand why you do what you do?
TD: Well, it's a job, right? It's not something we take pleasure in. There's a lot of stress for the animal when we're doing non-lethal work, so that's kind of the contradiction. If we're culling animals, there is no stress or pain. So for us, it's trying to minimize the animal's negative experience of the management activity.
Whether we like it or not, you can leave deer unchecked, but ultimately you will have the overabundance and the associated conflicts — deer-vehicle collisions, impacts to the land, landscape damage, impacts to the native forests, and tick-borne diseases. If people want to live with deer and not do anything, that's fine. It's just quite challenging for most suburbanites to live with all those potential impacts of an abundant deer population.
