Featured Story

Committee focuses on action to cull deer

111314i_DeerTick_web_jal
After months of deliberations about culling the deer herd here and no solutions to allocate more money for process, the Deer & Tick Committee last week agreed on some immediate action.

At the November 12 session, Town Councilman Ed Brown said if a solid plan for deer management is developed, he would ask his colleagues to find more money to support it.

One step the committee agreed to implement was to establish a subcommittee, including town hunters, to meet with committee members Jim Colligan and Steve Lenox to discuss specific incentives that could motivate increased culling. That committee is to report back to the Deer & Tick Committee with an action plan by the December 3 meeting,

“It gives us a concrete thing to get it done by December,” Mr. Colligan said.

Member Marc Wein suggested the subcommittee was better than “kicking the can down the road each month.”

While the subcommittee was his suggestion, he wasn’t appointed and neither was Police Chief Jim Read, who Mr. Wein had nominated for the subcommittee.

The committee also plans to set a Shelter Island meeting with local hunters and Dr. Tony DeNicola, president and founder of White Buffalo, a Connecticut-based nonprofit that specializes in deer management. The purpose is to determine if there’s a way to either affiliate or form a similar group here.

White Buffalo, considered a leading expert in controlling the population of white-tailed deer, has worked with other communities around the country. Because of holiday schedules, that meeting may not happen until January, but Deer & Tick Chairman Mike Scheibel promised to reach out to Mr. DeNicola to set a date.

Another initiative is to explore allowing off-Island hunters to hunt on town property. Police have already implemented an outreach to residents to volunteer more properties for hunting.

A specific plan is to be established with deadlines for an educational campaign to be prepared launched in May to ensure residents have information about the problems posed by deer, both in tick-borne diseases and traffic accidents.

The committee came to a somewhat reluctant agreement to book statistics on the number of deer carcasses cleaned from town roadways. Mr. Wein said that might be a more accurate number than police statistics on accidents involving deer, since not all drivers report accidents.

“You don’t know if it will show us anything until you look at the numbers,” Mr. Wein said, responding to Mr. Scheibel’s question on the value of new statistics.

Committee Secretary Jennifer Zacha said she will check with the Highway Department for the information compiled in the last few months.

She reported that since bow hunting started October 1, police have recorded 33 deer killed. Hunter Beau Payne said another 15 or 16 were taken by hunters on private property in the last week. He noted that many of the recreational hunters only started within the past week.

Dr. Scott Campbell, also calling in from another venue, told his colleagues that the Suffolk County’s newly formed tick advisory committee meets today, Thursday, November 20, and deer management is a major part of its discussions. The county committee continues to look to Shelter Island “for what is going well and what is going wrong” to guide its recommendations for other communities, Dr. Campbell said.

“I think that we are a little ahead” of surrounding communities, Mr. Colligan said.