I bought a gun, and I intend to use it
I can't take it anymore! I've bought a gun — and I intend to use it.
No, I won't be standing on my roof shooting at UFOs, though apparently that's a thing. Nor am I prepping for when the deep state sends the IRS, CDC and FBI to force me to take an AP African American Studies course, or whatever it is Jim Jordan and Ron DeSantis worry about these days.
But I do plan to be an armed vigilante. I will be wielding my gun against a brutal foe — one that destroys our forests, kills our wildflowers, sickens humans and threatens the very survival of birds, mammals, insects and amphibians.
I am becoming a deer hunter.
Wait! Don't shoot! Before you turn me in to the PETA police, please hear me out.
I love deer. My views on hunters come primarily from watching “Bambi.” When I was a kid, my family put out a salt lick to attract deer. My heart still leaps when I see a spotted fawn. I've never seriously considered owning a gun.
Until now.
Alas, peaceful coexistence with the white-tailed deer is no longer an option. Deer are no longer an adorable nuisance, munching our shrubs and flowers but otherwise minding their own business. They are causing an ecological disaster.
“The entire food web is unraveling,” Bernd Blossey, a professor of natural resources at Cornell University, tells me. “I call deer ‘ecological bullies,'” he adds — Bambi, a bully! — “taking house and home and the ability to live away from other organisms, whether they're birds, other mammals, insects or plants.”
The Nature Conservancy several years ago argued that deer might be “a bigger threat to Eastern forests than climate change.” And things have only worsened. Doug Tallamy, an entomologist and wildlife ecologist at the University of Delaware, tells me that white-tailed deer in the East are now “about 14 times over the carrying capacity,” meaning the ability of the ecosystem to sustain the species.
In the part of the Virginia Piedmont where I have a home, there are between 40 and 50 deer per square mile — compared to only 27 people per square mile. To get things back into ecological balance, Blossey estimates, we would need to get the deer population down below 10 per square mile.
I became aware of the great white-tailed menace when researching the threat that invasive plant species pose to the survival of our forests. Deer gobble up native flora so fast that the plants are disappearing, leaving a vacuum for invasive species (that deer don't enjoy) to fill.
Walk into the forest here, past the edge between field and woods where invasive vines now dominate, and you will find a manicured scene: all mature trees and no understory — none of the seedlings, saplings, flowers and shrubs that once covered the forest floor. The insatiable deer have eaten it all. They eat 3 percent to 5 percent of their body weight in leafy greens every day, Virginia state wildlife biologist David Kocka tells me.
This has set off cascading troubles throughout the forest.
Understory birds — ovenbirds, worm-eating warblers, wood thrushes, Kentucky warblers and others that make their nests on the forest floor — are now being decimated by predators because the deer have eaten the brush that once concealed their nests. “Most of the forest migratory birds are in trouble,” reports Bill McShea, a wildlife ecologist at Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal.
Disappearing too are native orchids, trillium, ginseng and a range of wildflowers. With the loss of these and other plants, we lose bees, butterflies, beetles and other insects that feed on them — in turn depriving birds, amphibians and other forest animals of their food.
Perhaps most ominously, the deer overpopulation prevents the growth of new trees, especially oaks, because they eat seedlings and saplings before the trees can mature. When old trees die, there are none to replace them. That means fewer acorns — the staple that allows bears, turkeys, woodpeckers, squirrels, chipmunks, mice and many other species to survive the winter. “The acorns coming out of those oaks make the world go around,” says McShea, and “there ain't no oaks coming up.”
On top of that, research shows a direct connection between the deer overpopulation and the threat to humans of Lyme disease, spread by ticks that feed on deer and white-footed mice. Also, more than 1 million American motorists hit deer on roads every year.
None of this is the deer's fault. They're doing what they're supposed to do. It's our fault for removing their predators, leaving them free to multiply to unnatural levels. And now it's our responsibility to fix the mess we've created.