Lakeway urged to conduct a deer count
City has consulted with the state on possible methods.
Every year, the city’s deer management committee works to keep the local population of whitetail deer under control. No one knows for sure exactly how many deer traipse through the Lakeway area every season, though, and some residents want to get a more accurate count.
Charles Edwards is the chairman of the deer management committee and a former mayor of Lakeway, and he’s been in the area long enough to remember when the deer population was greater, he said.
Last month, Edwards gave a presentation at a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department seminar on deer population control. The department used Lakeway as a “case study” example of a community that has been successful in controlling their deer population.
In the early 1990s, some residents were concerned about safety, because deer crossing the roadways resulted in dozens of wrecks per year. Without natural predators in the area, Edwards said, the deer population boomed.
“People couldn’t have landscaping around their house,” Edwards said. “You could also tell the condition of the deer — they were losing big segments of their hair; they had tumors all over their bodies. They were skin and bones, and you could count their ribs. That was the environment in 1999.”
Through much contention, the city tried various ways of getting rid of the deer, Edwards said. First, the city set up a program to trap the deer and drop them off in ranches in other parts of Texas, then in Mexico.
“At that point, it looked like the only path was to shoot them on sight,” Edwards said. “It would be very expensive. The scenario would be to trap them, kill them on the spot, field dress them and put them in coolers. It would have been a very cumbersome process, $400 or $500 per deer.”
It took the passing of companion House and Senate bills at the state level in 2003 to allow the city of Lakeway to trap deer and transport them alive to a processor, a process that costs the city about $200 per deer, Edwards said.
Once at the processor’s, they’re euthanized and made into ground chuck venison and given to the Capital Area Food Bank.
Though for the first years of the practices, around 200 deer per year were processed in this way. For the past five years, the program has trapped and processed about 100 deer a year.
The trapping process involves remote-controlled nets set up at several locations throughout the city. The city can only legally trap up to 250 deer per season, according to their permit.
Edwards said some residents came to a recent deer committee meeting and said the city should have a count on the number of deer and said the deer traps were hurting the deer, which he denies. He added that the deer go through much more suffering if they’re hit by a car.
“In four years, I’ve never seen a deer injured in a net or in back of a trailer,” said Detective Steve Howell, who supervises deer trappings. “We have to follow TPW rules and regulations.”
The city has unofficially consulted with Wildlife Department urban biologist Jessica Alderson about methods for counting deer. She suggested the city might save money if they used student volunteers from a couple of nearby colleges to perform the counts, looking for deer in various locations around the city at sundown.
The matter of counting the deer population has not yet come before the Lakeway City Council.