Year in Review: Deer effort a work in progress
Warehoused 4-poster units waiting for deployment in the field.
Another year has passed with another valiant effort by a largely volunteer group to determine how to combat what many consider a public health crisis.
The Deer & Tick Committee is taking a three-step approach to the problem:
• Educating the public about the issues involved;
• Increasing the number of 4-poster units that coat deer necks with permethrin to kill ticks that feast on deer;
• Increasing the number of deer killed by hunters.
The town has been proactive in allocating money to the 4-poster program and securing money from New York State to increase the number of units deployed. It’s estimated to cost between $4,000 to $5,000 per year to support each unit and there are those who question the effectiveness of the method.
Committee member Marc Wein has been most outspoken, citing instances of other communities that have abandoned 4-posters and statistics he said show they are only effective within a relatively small area.
Mr. Wein’s fellow committee members and Cornell Cooperative Extension and Cornell University officials, who used Shelter Island as a test site for the units for three years, continue to argue that 4-posters are effective. A recent report by Cornell on deer issues focuses on culling, with no mention of the 4-poster units .
That doesn’t represent a repudiation of the units, according to one of the authors of the latest report.
This year, the town deployed 32 units while Mashomack Preserve supported an additional six. That number is likely to remain stable in 2015 or increase slightly.
No one has come up with a reliable method to estimate the number of deer here. Hunters are alone in being skeptical there is a deer population problem as extensive as others seem to think, according to one of their own, Beau Payne. But he’s cooperated with efforts to reach out to his fellow hunters and to help improve communications between them and the committee.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation bans paying local hunters to kill deer, so Shelter Island, like other towns, is seeking indirect methods of rewarding the hunters. In the past year, there were small incentives for hunters to take more deer in the form of gift certificates.
So far, the town has rejected an effort to use paid sharpshooters on the Island and also rejected allowing non-Island residents to hunt here unless they are accompanied by local recreational hunters. In nearby Southold, the federal sharpshooters were used in 2014, but failed to produce effective results, according to officials there.
On the Island, there’s concern for safety in letting people unfamiliar with the area hunt here.
As for the third step — education — the committee is poised for a major effort in the spring that would include newspaper advertisements offering facts about the deer and tick problems and directing readers to the town website where they plan fuller discussion on various issues.
One unanswered question, among many, concerns the process of butchering the carcasses hunters bring in and arranging to distribute the meat to food pantries and others who might want venison. The town has two butchers who are paid for their work, but not even Committee Chairman Mike Scheibel has a handle on how the system works. It’s something the Reporter is trying to determine, working with Police Chief Jim Read, who coordinates hunting on town sites.
While the 2015 budget for the Deer & Tick Committee allots most of the money to support the deployment and maintenance of 4-poster units, Councilman Ed Brown, a liaison to the committee who usually takes a tight-fisted approach to spending, has been forthright in saying he would lead the effort to convince his fellow Town Board members to allocate more money to culling the herd if an effective program is developed.
