By JIM STERBA
This year, Princeton, N.J.,
has hired sharpshooters to cull 250 deer from the town's herd of 550 over the
winter. The cost: $58,700. Columbia, S.C., is spending $1 million to rid its
drainage systems of beavers and their dams. The 2009 "miracle on the
Hudson," when US Airways flight 1549 had to make an emergency landing
after its engines ingested Canada geese, saved 155 passengers and crew, but the
$60 million A320 Airbus was a complete loss. In the U.S., the total cost of
wildlife damage to crops, landscaping and infrastructure now exceeds $28
billion a year ($1.5 billion from deer-vehicle crashes alone), according to
Michael Conover of Utah State University, who monitors conflicts between people
and wildlife.
Those conflicts often pit
neighbor against neighbor. After a small dog in Wheaton, Ill., was mauled by a
coyote and had to be euthanized, officials hired a nuisance wildlife mitigation
company. Its operator killed four coyotes and got voice-mail death threats. A
brick was tossed through a city official's window, city-council members were
peppered with threatening emails and letters, and the FBI was called in. After
Princeton began culling deer 12 years ago, someone splattered the mayor's car
with deer innards.
Welcome to the nature wars, in
which Americans fight each other over too much of a good thing—expanding
wildlife populations produced by our conservation and environmental successes.
We now routinely encounter wild birds and animals that our parents and
grandparents rarely saw. As their numbers have grown, wild creatures have
spread far beyond their historic ranges into new habitats, including ours. It
is very likely that in the eastern United States today more people live in
closer proximity to more wildlife than anywhere on Earth at any time in
history.
In a world full of eco-woes
like species extinctions, this should be wonderful news—unless, perhaps, you
are one of more than 4,000 drivers who will hit a deer today, or your child's
soccer field is carpeted with goose droppings, or feral cats have turned your
bird feeder into a fast-food outlet, or wild turkeys have eaten your newly
planted seed corn, or beavers have flooded your driveway, or bears are looting
your trash
In just a few decades we have
turned a wildlife comeback miracle into a mess that's getting messier, and
costlier. How did this happen? The simple answer: Forests grew back over the
past two centuries, wildlife came back over the past century and people sprawled
across the landscape over the past half-century.
Reforestation began in
19th-century New England, when farmers started abandoning marginal pastures and
buying cheap feed grain from the rich, relatively flat lands on the other end
of the newly opened Erie Canal. Later, petroleum-based fertilizers and
gasoline-powered machinery made Midwestern farming more productive and draft
animals obsolete, freeing up 70 million acres that were being used to feed
them. Many farmers, meanwhile, opted for jobs in town. Trees took back much of
their land and, after World War II, nonfarmers began moving onto it.
Today, the eastern third of
the country has the largest forest in the contiguous U.S., as well as
two-thirds of its people. Since the 19th century, forests have grown back to
cover 60% of the land within this area. In New England, an astonishing 86.7% of
the land that was forested in 1630 had been reforested by 2007, according to
the U.S. Forest Service. Not since the collapse of Mayan civilization 1,200
years ago has reforestation on this scale happened in the Americas, says David
Foster, director of the Harvard Forest, an ecology research unit of Harvard
University. In 2007, forests covered 63.2% of Massachusetts and 58% of
Connecticut, the third and fourth most densely populated states in the country,
not counting forested suburban and exurban sprawl (though a lot of sprawl has
enough trees to be called a real forest if people and their infrastructure
weren't there).
Some 350 years of unbridled
exploitation of wild birds and animals for feathers, furs, hides and food by
commercial market-hunters and settlers escalated into a late 19th-century
rampage that turned wild populations into remnants. It all started with a
50-pound rodent.
The "fur trade" is a
feeble euphemism for the massacre of beavers, America's first commodity animal.
By the late 19th century, a population once estimated at as many as 400 million
was down to perhaps 100,000, mostly in the Canadian outback. By 1894, the
largest forest left in the eastern U.S., the Adirondacks, was down to a single
family of five beavers.
Beyond beavers, by 1890, a pre-Columbian whitetail deer population of
perhaps 30 million had been reduced to an estimated 350,000. Ten million wild
turkeys had been reduced to no more than 30,000 by 1920. Geese and ducks were
migrating remnants. Bears, wolves and other "vermin" were all but
gone. The passenger pigeon would soon be extinct. The feathered skins of
hummingbirds, used to make women's bonnets, sold for two cents apiece.
With toothless laws and lax enforcement, the carnage was slow to end. But
conservationists slowly gained strength. Elected governor of New York in 1898,
Theodore Roosevelt was so incensed that plume-hunters were killing egrets,
whooping cranes and other exotic shore birds for women's hats that he outlawed
their sale in his state and went on, as president, to create the first federal
wildlife refuges and national forests.
Restocking wildlife was a
mixed bag. In 1907, 50 Michigan white-tailed deer were shipped to Pennsylvania.
Eleven years later, foresters and truck farmers there were complaining about
"too many deer"—a phrase uttered to this day. In many places,
however, seeing a deer (or a goose) in the 1950s and '60s was still so rare it
made the local newspaper.
Between 1901 and 1907, 34
beavers from Canada were released in the Adirondacks. With no predators and no
trapping, they grew to 15,000 by 1915. Today they are almost everywhere that
water flows and trees grow. Beavers are wonderful eco-engineers, a so-called
keystone species building dams that create wetlands that benefit countless
other species, filter pollutants, reduce erosion and control seasonal flooding.
The trouble is, they share our taste in waterfront real estate but not in
landscaping. We put in a driveway, they flood it. We plant expensive trees,
they chew them down. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the cost
of beaver damage may exceed that of any other wild species.
Bringing back ducks and geese was slow going. Commercial and sport hunters
long kept live birds (in addition to wooden facsimiles) as decoys to lure
migrating waterfowl. The use of these live flocks wasn't outlawed until 1935.
They hadn't migrated in generations. The outlaw birds were used to stock newly
created refuges in the hope that they would join migrating flocks and help them
to grow. But they stayed put. Their descendants include the four million or so
resident Canada geese that now occupy golf courses, parks, athletic fields,
corporate lawns and airline flight paths.
The founders of the
conservation movement would have been astonished to learn that by the 2000
Census, a majority of Americans lived not in cities or on working farms but in
that vast doughnut of sprawl in between. They envisioned neither sprawl nor
today's conflicts between people and wildlife. The assertion by animal
protectionists that these conflicts are our fault because we encroached on
wildlife habitat is only half the story. As our population multiplies and
spreads, many wild creatures encroach right back—even species thought to be
people-shy, such as wild turkeys and coyotes. (In Chicago alone, there are an
estimated 2,000 coyotes.)
Why? Our habitat is better
than theirs. We offer plenty of food, water, shelter and protection. We plant
grass, trees, shrubs and gardens, put out birdseed, mulch and garbage.
Sprawl supports a lot more critters than a people-free forest does. For
many species, sprawl's biological carrying capacity—the population limit the
food and habitat can sustain—is far greater than a forest's. Its ecological
carrying capacity (the point at which a species adversely affects the habitat
and the other animals and plants in it) isn't necessarily greater. The rub for
many species is what's called social carrying capacity, which is subjective. It
means the point at which the damage a creature does outweighs its benefits in
the public mind. And that's where many battles in today's wildlife wars start.
What to do? Learn to live with
them? Move them? Fool them into going away? Sterilize them? Kill them? For
every option and every creature there is a constituency. We have bird lovers
against cat lovers; people who would save beavers from cruel traps and people
who would save yards and roads from beaver flooding; Bambi saviors versus
forest and garden protectors.
Wildlife biologists say that we should be managing our ecosystems for the
good of all inhabitants, including people. Many people don't want to and don't
know how. We have forsaken not only our ancestors' destructive ways but much of
their hands-on nature know-how as well. Our knowledge of nature arrives on
screens, where wild animals are often packaged to act like cuddly little people
that our Earth Day instincts tell us to protect. Animal rights people say
killing, culling, lethal management, "human-directed mortality" or
whatever euphemism you choose is inhumane and simply creates a vacuum that more
critters refill. By that logic, why pull garden weeds or trap basement rats?
People against killing usually
advocate wildlife birth control. Practical and affordable contraception for deer
was said to be just around the corner 30 years ago. It still is. You can dart
female deer living in a confined area (behind a fence, on an island) with PZP
(porcine zona pellucid) for $25 per dose plus hundreds of dollars per animal
per year to set up and run the program. For free-ranging deer, forget it. You
can feed OvoControl to Canada geese to stop their eggs from hatching for $12
per goose per season. Do the math.
For feral cats, the panacea is called trap-neuter-return: The cats are
trapped (not easy), sterilized and then returned to where they were caught.
Voilà, no more feral kittens! Even the American Veterinary Medical Association
calls this a mirage because "an insignificant percentage" of 60 to 90
million ferals out there at any one time have been neutered to reduce their
overall population. And "returning" these nonnative predators to the
landscape drives bird protection groups up the wall.
Some people advocate bringing
back natural predators, as if they really want wolves and cougars roaming the
sprawl. But they overlook a deer predator that is already there: us. Indeed,
research suggests that since the last ice age the top predator of deer has been
man. But by blanketing sprawl with firearms restrictions and hunting
prohibitions in the name of safety we have taken ourselves out of the predation
business in just a few decades. Suddenly, for the first time in 11,000 years,
we have put hundreds of thousands of square miles in the heart of the
white-tailed deer's historic range off-limits to its biggest predator.
In Massachusetts, it is
illegal to discharge a firearm within 150 feet of a hard-surfaced road or
within 500 feet of an occupied dwelling without the owner's written permission.
These restrictions alone put about 60% of the state off-limits to hunting with
guns. And nearly half of its 351 municipalities impose more restrictions,
including on bow hunters. Many states and towns have similar restrictions.
Local governments are increasingly hiring sharpshooters to cull deer, and
homeowners retain nuisance wildlife controllers (trappers) to kill beavers,
geese, coyotes and whatever is in the attic. Bryon Shissler, president of
Natural Resources Consultants in Fort Hill, Pa., who consults on deer problems
with towns, corporations and property owners, sometimes recommends hiring
sharpshooters to cull herds. He also thinks towns could train local hunters
(typically cops and firefighters) to sharp shoot and then recoup town costs by
selling the venison at local farm markets. It is illegal, however, to sell any
truly wild game in America today. But that could change.
After decades of decline, the
number of hunters in the U.S. grew 9% from 2006 to 2011, according to a U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service survey. But they remain outcasts in many of the
places where they are needed most because they are thought to be unsafe. Even
that, however, may be changing. Some towns are becoming more tolerant of
hunters than of deer, noting that while guns kill 31,000 Americans a year,
hunters kill only about 100, mostly each other. Deer, on the other hand, kill
upward of 250 people a year—drivers and passengers—and hospitalize 30,000 more.
Some communities screen hunters, allowing them to use only bows and arrows and
shotguns that have limited ranges.
One encouraging example is
Weston, Mass., in suburban Boston, a town with a serious deer problem. Brian
Donahue, associate professor of environmental studies at Brandeis University,
serves on the town's conservation commission, which decided to try controlled
bow hunting this fall. He sees some of his liberal suburban neighbors coming to
believe that "hunting is good—one of the best, most responsible forms of
stewardship of nature," he says.
"Maybe I'm
dreaming," he adds, "but hunters are the new suburban heroes."
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