BETHEL, Conn. — In the early hours of Saturday, June 11, 2011,
a motorist driving an SUV along Route 15 in Milford, Connecticut,
struck and killed a mountain lion. That’s right. A mountain lion.
In Connecticut. This event occurred a little more than a week after
a moose was sighted ambling through my little of town Bethel. If
anyone wants to know where the wild things are, they’re in suburban
and rural and even urban Connecticut.
Let me give you a few examples of what I’ve witnessed in
my own backyard. One afternoon while on the phone with my Dad I saw
a coyote sprint out of the woods and nail a fat groundhog that was
waddling across the grass. Several times I’ve witnessed a hawk
pounce on a chipmunk or a deer mouse. One night I was awoken by the
awful screams of fawn being torn apart by a pack of
coyotes.
I have my own personal herd of deer that live in the
forested back acre of my property, a place they share with coyotes
and red foxes. The deer have become so used to the sight and smell
of humans that I can be working at one end of the yard while the
herd continues to graze at the other end. Deer are lovely. Fawns
are adorable. Did you know that typically does give birth to twin
fawns? Until I moved here, me neither.
Yet deer have become a serious problem in Connecticut.
According to the Wildlife Division of the Connecticut Department of
Environmental Protection, the population of white-tailed deer in
Connecticut is “overabundant.” That’s an understatement. A single
square mile can support 10 to 12 deer, yet throughout the state
typically the numbers are much higher—60, 70, even 90 deer per
square mile. Erring on the side of caution with 60 per square mile,
that works out to 290,700 deer statewide. Such numbers are not only
a problem for deer that are competing with each other for food,
they present serious problems for the deer’s human
neighbors.
Deer spread the tick-borne Lyme disease to humans: since
1996, 29,000 cases have been diagnosed in Connecticut. On average,
deer require a daily diet of 5 to 10 pounds of forage, so they
treat our gardens like open-air salad bars, which is extremely
expensive for gardeners. The town of Fairfield estimates that on
average deer do $17 million worth of damage every year to public
and private plantings in the community. Yes, there are deer
resistant plants, but if deer have decided to eat something, they
will. A landscaper told me that he had planted 50 lily of the
valley plants in a client’s garden. Lily of valley is said to be
poisonous to deer, and so a safe plant. By the next morning deer
had eaten them all. And the lawn was not littered with deer
corpses.
In their quest for food the deer are clearing out
native-born woodland plants and wildflowers, including such rare
species as the lady’s slipper orchid. This groundcover is home to
various species of birds and small mammals. Once their habitat is
gone, they leave and the ecology of the woodlands begins to go out
of whack.
The trouble is, the deer no longer have natural predators
such as wolves or mountain lions to keep their population in check.
According to Connecticut lore, in 1743, 25-year-old Israel Putnam
killed the last wolf in Connecticut. There is no comparable story
for the mountain lions, although that situation appears to be
self-correcting. Nonetheless, at present the deer’s only enemy
(aside from hunters) is a speeding automobile. On average, 18,000
deer are killed along Connecticut roadways annually. Repairs for a
deer-and-car collision costs on average $1,600; there are no
figures for the cost in medical expenses for injured drivers and
passengers.
The primary reason for the boom in wildlife in Connecticut
is the expansion of forests in the state. Today, 60 percent of the
state is forest. Compare that with the state in 1900, when forests
covered between 20 and 30 percent of Connecticut. The 20th century
saw a trend of families moving off their farms. Once the fields and
pastures were no longer being worked by man, Nature moved in.
Later, part of this newly wooded land was cleared for housing, but
enough of it remained to make an ideal habitat for deer. Cover in
the woods; plenty to eat in the humans’ gardens; and no
predators.
What to do? Giving deer birth control vaccines has been a
failure. Trap and relocation programs can cost up to $3,000 per
deer. Even if the state had the spare cash (which, Lord knows, we
do not), all the other states are suffering the same deer problem,
and they don’t want ours. Some towns have hired sharpshooters to
reduce deer populations, which invariably brings howls of protest
from the local Bambi/anthropomorphic coalition. It doesn’t matter
that the deer population is out of control, or that the deer spread
Lyme disease, or that the venison is donated to the local food
pantry, for some Americans, cuteness will always triumph over
reason. I’ve invited a friend’s son, an experienced bow hunter, to
come to my house, open a dining room window, and pull up chair —
he’ll be able to bag a herd without stepping outside the
house.
So it comes down to this: given the lack of four legged
predators in the state, we two-legged types will have to step in. I
know it sounds harsh, but the problem is our responsibility —
until we see a serious boost in Connecticut’s population of
mountain lions.
