White-tailed Deer/Pixabay.
To protect and restore native vegetation, promote healthy and diverse forests, and preserve historic landscapes, four western Maryland national parks are preparing to implement previously approved white-tailed deer management plans. The National Park Service will donate all suitable meat from reduction activities to local food banks. Last year, national parks in western Maryland and the District of Columbia donated more than 14,000 pounds of venison to local food banks.
Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park will conduct its first season of deer reduction activities, Antietam National Battlefield and Monocacy National Battlefield will conduct their third season of deer reduction activities, and Catoctin Mountain Park will continue with the 10th year of its deer management efforts. For public safety, limited park areas will be temporarily closed while reduction operations are underway. Visitors and area residents are encouraged to check their local park’s website for the most up-to-date information and are reminded to respect posted closures.
Overabundant deer populations damage vegetation and eat nearly all the tree seedlings, compromising the ability of forests to sustain themselves. Deer also damage the crops that are a key component of the historic setting, as crop farming was present at the battlefields during the Civil War and the parks’ enabling legislation mandates preservation of these important cultural landscapes.
Extensive safety measures will be in place to protect park visitors and neighbors during operations. Biologists, who are also highly trained firearms experts via the U.S. Department of Agriculture, will work under the direction of National Park Service resource management specialists and in coordination with law enforcement park rangers to perform reduction operations in a manner proven safe and effective. Hunting is not legal in these four western Maryland national parks.
Deer management has produced positive results at several area national parks. Catoctin Mountain Park (Md.) has actively worked to reduce deer populations in the park since 2010 and has seen more than a 10-fold increase in seedling density over the past nine years. Several additional national parks across the country actively manage deer populations including Rock Creek Park (D.C.), Gettysburg National Military Park (Pa.), Valley Forge National Historical Park (Pa.) and Cuyahoga Valley National Park (Oh.).
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Comments
So now they call hunting(which I support) " Deer reduction activity". Will the PC never stop??
I think our experience in Rock Creek Park may capture some issues that apply to this set of National Parks. Over the last six years, we have seen regular late fall bulletins from the National Park Service (NPS) announcing a “window of opportunity” for sharpshooters to kill deer in Rock Creek Park. The NPS claims that the deer need to be killed because they are consuming too many tree seedlings and damaging the ability of the Park to renew itself. At the time it was first proposed Save The Rock Creek Park Deer opposed this program and took the NPS to court, on the basis that we have seen no evidence of any threat to the Park from the deer. Instead we believe the threat comes from the non-native and invasive plants that have taken over the park, as reported in many Rock Creek Park documents.
The Courts ruled that NPS had the legal authority to kill the deer (the courts did not evaluate the desirability of their action). And so the yearly killings began in 2013 and have been going on ever since. Now we have some very strong evidence that the basis for the annual kills is false and that the killing is not decreasing the population as expected.
The evidence against the justification given for the kill comes from the most recent report of the study NPS uses to justify the kills. This study, conducted by the US Geological Survey for NPS, evaluates the effect of the deer by comparing plots within the park where deer are fenced out to similar unfenced plots. The most recent update of the study also uses a very direct measure of the potential of the park to renew itself based upon counts of tree seedlings. The study authors found that there is no significant difference between the fenced and matched unfenced plots in the stocking rate, a measure of ability to regenerate the forest. In other words, it made no difference whether the deer had access or not – they did not change the ability of the forest to regenerate.
It is clear that the authorities in the USGS found this to be a devastating result because they went to great lengths to keep the study secret in spite of the fact that it is a purely scientific report which should be released without question. Save the Rock Creek Park Deer had to sue USGS under the Freedom of Information Act in order to obtain the report.
In addition, a recent comparison of deer population before and after a kill found that the population had actually increased substantially. In the fall of 2016 the NPS estimated only about 19 deer per square mile in the main section of the Park. But in the fall of 2017 the estimaters found there were 55 deer per square mile, about a three-fold increase. This is population rebound, a common result of lethal methods of deer population control: the deer have twins and triplets rather than single fawns and in other ways increase the birth rate. It is not what NPS envisioned in its plan and likely means that many new fawns born in the spring because of a rebound will be shot down in the fall or orphaned when their mothers are killed. If population control is needed there are methods that avoid this rebound and are more humane and safer.
In September of 2018, Save the Rock Creek Park Deer wrote a letter to NPS outlining our arguments in some detail and asking NPS to immediately halt the killing and re-evaluate their policy. They have refused. A recent on-line petition asking NPS to make these changes has more than 50,000 supporters so far. We hope the NPS will listen and apply these lessons to other parks as well.
Anne Barton, Save the Rock Creek Park Deer
The National Park Service (NPS) has declared a war on deer, and with no objective scientific facts or impact statements (Rock Creek National Park is a perfect example) and they are turning our national parks, many of which are battlefields where thousands of soldiers had been killed and laid to "rest in peace" on-site, into a new bloody killing field. It's outrageous! Any parks where there might actually be an issue, the NPS has refused to implement proven humane solutions like immunocontraception, that would have shown the highest respect for military graveyards, and would have humanely and safely manage the deer population with no controversy. When the NPS ignores the Humane Society of the United States opposition to these NPS slaughters, you know that there's something wrong going on. The NPS is doing this annual slaughter with our tax dollars, and ignores the overwhelming criticisms received during public comments. Someone at NPS needs to respond to these growing criticisms and be made accountable.