AUTUMN FAWN
Tom Caruso snapped this photo of a young whitetail deer in a meadow at Caleb Smith State Park Preserve in his hometown of Smithtown on Dec. 6. He writes, ‘I followed a small herd of deer for a while and was amazed by how comfortable they were with my presence. I snapped this picture of the smallest deer as it took a break from grazing to check me out. It was a great experience getting so close to them.’
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Deer grazing near roadways may look innocent but they can pose a possible hazard — even a deadly one — for drivers.
As fall arrives, the animals’ presence becomes an even greater danger. A higher percentage of deer are now more likely to dart out into the road as they are in the midst of their rutting season, which runs from October through December. Driving during dusk and dawn exacerbates the problem with reduced visibility.
According to a press release from AAA Northeast, there were 36,445 animal crashes in New York State in 2019, and the number of crashes has increased over the past five years. Suffolk County was found to have the third highest amount of animal crashes with 1,415. In 2019, Brookhaven had 423 animal crashes while Smithtown had 120.
The data was taken from the Institute for Traffic Safety Management and Research, an affiliate with the University at Albany’s Rockefeller College of Public Affairs, which does not cite which animals were involved in the crash. However AAA Northeast said in its press release that “data from New York and other states previous years found deer were involved in 88 to 98 percent of crashes.”
“Striking a deer can be extremely dangerous, with the animal possibly going through the windshield, seriously injuring or killing the driver and passengers,” said Robert Sinclair Jr., spokesman for AAA Northeast.
AAA Northeast recommends drivers brake gently and avoid swerving when encountering any animals.
“Going to the right could send the vehicle into a ditch, tree or light pole,” the AAA Northeast press release said. “Swerving to the left could result in a lethal head-on crash. Even hitting the brakes hard could send the front end of the vehicle into a nosedive, promoting the animal rolling up the hood and through the windshield.”
Other tips from AAA and insurance companies include:
● Be extra cautious when you see a deer-crossing sign along a roadway. The sign means that there have been deer-vehicle collisions near the sign location.
● Decrease speed when you approach deer near roadsides as they can bolt out or change direction quickly. If you see a deer, look for others as they are herd animals and usually travel in groups. Especially during rutting season when a buck may be chasing a doe.
● Move your vehicle to a safe place if you hit an animal. If possible, pull over to the side of the road and turn on your hazard lights. If you must leave your vehicle, stay off the road and out of the way of any oncoming vehicles.
● Call the police. Alert authorities if the animal is blocking traffic and creating a threat for other drivers. If the collision results in injury, death or more than $1,000 in property damage, you must fill out an official crash report and send it to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles.
● Look for leaking fluid, loose parts, tire damage, broken lights, a hood that won’t latch and other safety hazards. If your vehicle seems unsafe in any way, call for a tow truck.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation recommends not getting out of your car and approaching an injured animal as they can strike out with their legs or hooves. In Brookhaven, residents can call the Animal Shelter at 631-451-6950 to report deceased deer on the road or curbside. Town employees cannot remove animals found on front lawns, backyards or on driveways.
PICTURE PERFECT
Joe Glenn was lucky enough to spot this beautiful deer while visiting Avalon Park & Preserve in his hometown of Stony Brook. While the park remains open to visitors, the entrance at the Stony Brook Grist Mill is now temporarily closed for renovations.
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STRIKE A POSE
Bill Pollack of East Setauket snapped this beautiful image of a doe this past fall at the West Meadow Beach bluffs. He writes, ‘[It was] posing for a photo at sunset.
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With villages like Belle Terre and Port Jefferson taking steps in handling the issue of deer in their municipalities, Town of Brookhaven representatives say there’s things they can do at the Town level to stop the scourge of deer and their impact on the local environment.
At a forum hosted by Valerie Cartright (D-Port Jefferson Station) and representatives of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, residents were split on how to handle the overwhelming deer population, but no one questioned whether their impact has been felt far and wide, whether it’s from them simply eating people’s gardens or the mass depletion of saplings and bushes in Long Island forests.
“We have not played an active role in respect to deer management,” Cartright said. “It is an issue within our Town, and we can’t rely solely on our villages. So, it’s a question of how can we work with the villages, or how we can do something on our own.”
Leslie Lupo, a big game wildlife biologist for the DEC, said that, despite some misconceptions, deer do very well living in a suburban landscape such as Long Island, especially since they have no natural predators. They are polygamous and have short gestation periods, which means, unchecked, their population continues to grow.
“No management means more and more deer,” Lupo said.
Despite residents’ constant complaints of deer eating plants and vegetables at people’s homes and gardens, deer have had an even more major impact on Long Island’s forests and biodiversity, the biologist said. Many of the saplings in forests have been eaten by deer, and their favoring of ground plants has meant the loss of habitat for some songbird species.
“They are a huge changer of their own habitat,” she added. “Deer will just eat everything here and move on to the next property.”
Cartright said the forum was an example of one of the first steps the DEC provides in its deer management guide, originally published in 2012, in starting to make change. Over the last several years, the deer issue has ballooned into near-crisis proportions. While state officials said they cannot give estimates of the number of deer on Long Island, due to migration and other mitigating factors, the total number of deer shot and tagged by hunters in Suffolk County is around 3,200-3,400 in the last five years.
Multiple North Shore villages have gotten ahead of towns in dealing directly with the deer issue. Belle Terre, for example, has been allowing residents to bring in hunters onto their properties as long as they conform to state laws regarding setbacks from other properties. Belle Terre Mayor Bob Sandak said this has already made a significant impact in the village’s deer population.
What More Can Be Done?
With the need to reduce deer population clear, the two major schools of thoughts are to either encourage recreational hunting or professional culls or by surgical or chemical sterilization. Lupo favored hunting, citing mixed-at-best results from sterilization initiatives.
Lupo called recreational hunting the most utilized tool for the DEC and said it is “safe and effective” with a large bowhunting culture on Long Island. Even with nonlethal alternatives, she suggested it would be more effective combined with lethal removal.
Both Lupo and several hunters who came to the Jan. 30 meeting said, despite areas which have been opened up with cooperative agreements with the DEC, there are many parts of the Island where they are restricted from hunting.
Not all municipal lands allow access. While the setback for bowhunters between properties was changed from 500 feet in 2012 to 150 feet a few years later, hunters said there are only a few public properties on which they can actually hunt. The archery season, which runs from Oct. 1 through Jan. 31, is much longer than the shotgun season, which only runs from Jan. 4 to Jan. 31 and requires a Town permit or landowner consent form. The DEC’s tagging system essentially allows for “an unlimited harvest of deer,” Lupo said. “The harvest has been increasing and increasing to go along with our increased population.”
Though DEC officials said some harvest years are better than others, and some are worse than others since various conditions can impact harvest rates, such as weather.
John German, of the Brookhaven hamlet and an avid hunter, said that, despite there being a large hunting crowd, the number of deer does not seem to have stymied. He and other hunters complained about Town-owned lands in which they are unable to hunt.
“There’s more deer now than there ever was,” German said.
Some called for the Town when it buys land for municipal purposes to allow hunters on that property, but Cartright said the majority of space the Town acquires is small and not conducive to hunting.
Lupo said that residents or the Town could start organizing hunts and allow residents to interact with them to allay fears, but other residents strongly supported sterilization initiatives, including Elaine Maas, a board member of the Four Harbors Audubon Society, who pointed to data from Hastings-on-Hudson and its chemical contraceptive program, which from 2014 to 2018 sterilized about 60 deer, which the city described as about 75 percent of the population.
Maas also said she has had issues with hunters on a neighboring property for years and described being “confined” in her own home during hunting season.
Surgical sterilization can cost as much as $1,000 per deer, while chemical sterilization can cost anywhere from $500 to $3,000. At minimum, 75-90 percent of females would need to be treated to see some effect. Lupo also said another issue is that, in an uncontrolled setting, deer often migrate to and away from some areas, meaning that some chemical sterilization techniques that require multiple treatments become that much harder.
“Maybe it will prove to be more beneficial in the future,” she said.
Cartright said the next step is to get the rest of the Town council on board. While the board could form a committee in the future, there’s a few “low hanging fruit,” including doing a survey and speaking with villages and her fellow board members. She also mentioned changing Town code regarding fencing to make more residents able to buy higher barriers on property.
This post has been amended Feb. 13 to correct Lupo’s comment on managing deer, also to change “incubation period” to “gestation period” and add context to another of Lupo’s quotes.
DIVING IN
Tom Caruso of Smithtown was in the right place at the right time when he snapped this photo on Nov. 23. He writes, ‘I was photographing the river at the Nissequogue River State Park when I heard a commotion behind me. I turned to see this deer jumping into the river to escape someone’s dog who had chased it out of the woods. I quickly snapped a few shots and was lucky to get this one just as the deer hit the water. He swam across the river and exited on Short Beach.’
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Drivers are regularly reminded that deer populations along the North Shore of Long Island are increasing as many of the animals graze alongside or dart across roadways. Some of these encounters unfortunately end in collisions. With deer and people on the move during the busy holiday season, TBR News Media is taking a look at issues to hopefully curb the impact.
Destruction of vegetation
Christina Maffia, who has lived in Old Field South for 18 years, said she sees deer on her property every day, sometimes a lone buck and other times two or three animals. She described her property as “once lush, green, temperate forest that has been reduced to bare limbs below 5 feet.” She said her perennials don’t grow back due to being continuously eaten.
The appearance of depleted vegetation coincided with the arrival of the deer a few years ago. She said her neighborhood had been planted back when Frank Melville established the neighborhood in 1929. The grounds in Old Field South were designed by the landscape architecture firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, which also designed Central Park.
“These plantings are considered historical,” she said. “It’s such a shame that the historical part of this area that made it so beautiful is now being compromised.”
Maffia has sprayed her plants with a product called Deer Off, which incorporates rotten eggs in the ingredients. It deters deer, she said, but her experience has been that whenever it rains or she runs the sprinklers, she needs to reapply the product which she uses around the perimeter of her property.
The Village of Old Field recently sent an email to residents encouraging them to use deer repellent on their properties. Village officials reminded homeowners that a new generation of deer will establish their own feeding trails this time of the year. Because of these new trails, “it is a good time of year to use repellents to redirect these trails before they become solidly developed,” the village said.
According to the village email, deer repellent means less plant damage during fall and winter, and fewer deer in the village.
Kathy Schiavone, of Port Jefferson, said she and her husband also have problems with their landscaping due to the deer.
“We had tried the various remedies that have been suggested and have come to the conclusion that we will no longer buy and plant flowers to ornament our yard,” she said. “We did replace a number of yews with Japanese plum yews, which the deer do not bother. We had done this about five years ago. So far, so good.”
According to the DEC’s website, among the food deer prefer are cedar, sassafras, wintergreen, yew, mountain maple, flowering dogwood and more. A list of other vegetation they feed on can be found at www.dec.ny.gov/animals/7195.html.
There is evidence that deer are also altering forests across New York, according to the DEC. This can reduce diversity in the forest understory, enable invasive species to outcompete natives and prevent seedlings of many species from growing into the next generation of trees.
Lyme disease
Maffia and Schiavone said they are concerned about deer ticks and contracting Lyme disease due to the increased population of deer. Both have friends and neighbors who have suffered from the tick-borne disease. Schiavone said she also knows four people who have contracted babesiosis, three of whom had to be hospitalized. Maffia said she had one neighbor with Lyme disease who later got Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Another was hospitalized with a severe inflammation around his heart caused by Lyme disease.
“It’s not just aesthetics anymore,” Maffia said. “It’s people being impacted by the deer.”
Nancy Irvolino has lived near Brooksite Drive in Smithtown for more than 40 years and has noticed an increase of the animals in the area.
“Sometimes they are on the side [of Brooksite], but a lot of times they run out at night in front of my car and I slam the brakes,” she said.
While Blydenburgh County Park abuts the lane she lives on, she said it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that she started seeing deer walking down her street and eating plants. Recently, she has seen them every night near her house.
Irvolino said she worries about herself and her dogs contracting Lyme disease and doesn’t even walk in the park due to it.
According to the DEC website, deer are the primary food source for adult female ticks and reduction of deer populations to very low levels may reduce tick densities and infection rates.
The Village of Old Field email to residents claimed that deer over time can carry thousands of ticks.
Solutions
Villages across the North Shore are debating the best way to cull the herds.
“My hope is that our elected officials will realize the overabundance of deer is an important enough public issue to take action against,” Schiavone said.
Brookhaven Town Councilwoman Valerie Cartright (D-Port Jefferson Station) is currently working to present a townwide forum on deer with the DEC in the near future, according to her office.
Belle Terre allows bow hunting, and Head of the Harbor last year joined Avalon Park & Preserve in Stony Brook with a contraceptive vaccine experiment to help with deer management. The DEC supports the use of sharpshooters, who aim for an instant kill, so the animal doesn’t suffer and also advocates donating the meat to food banks.
“I am not a fan of hunting just for the sake of demonstrating one’s prowess in killing any animal,” Schiavone said. “I have been convinced by information I have gotten that culling is the answer.”
Maffia, who has been a vegetarian for 30 years, agreed.
“At this point, because there are no natural predators, they’re attacking so many things people wouldn’t think of.”
— Christina Maffia
“At this point, because there are no natural predators, they’re attacking so many things people wouldn’t think of,” she said.
Maffia said she and her wife, Donna Crinnian, have been able to decrease the amount of bird seed they buy in the winter as nesting birds have disappeared since the deer have eaten the ground covering where the birds would nest.
“They’re impacting the ecosystem,” she said.
In the Village of Port Jefferson, where hunting is prohibited, residents are asked to call 631-774-0066 if they see a deceased deer on the road and 631-744-2507 if they see a wounded deer on their property. Those who spot hunter tree stands on private property can call Kathy Grady, DEC officer, at 631-744-2507 so the location can be checked to see if it qualifies as legal hunting ground.
Brookhaven residents can call the Animal Shelter at 631-451-6950 to report deceased deer on the road. In Smithtown, people can call the Animal Shelter at 631-360-7575 about dead or injured wildlife.
When it comes to roadways, the Department of Motor Vehicles advises drivers to be extra cautious during both dawn and dusk when deer are most active, especially in the autumn months.
Insurance company State Farm recently released its animal collision study from claims data from July 1, 2018, to June 30, 2019, which estimated 1.9 million animal collision claims industrywide nationally, the large majority being with deer. During the same period, it was estimated there were 1.5 million deer claims.
“Remember, animals are unpredictable, especially when faced with glaring headlights, blowing horns and fast-moving vehicles,” said Billy Williams, Setauket State Farm agent. “They often dart into traffic.”
He added that drivers should remember that deer move in herds, so if one is seen on a roadway there may be more following.
Sweetbriar Nature Center in Smithtown got an emergency call May 28 from Suffolk County Legislator Robert Trotta (R-Fort Salonga). He was driving on the Sunken Meadow Parkway when he encountered a man on the side of the road aiding a dying doe that went into labor after being struck by a car.
The man, Gordon Edelstein, was pulling a fawn from the birth canal as Trotta got out of his car. Another newborn fawn, which was lying nearby, seemed healthy, he said. The second-born fawn was breathing faintly, so Edelstein, a retired Marine administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Unfortunately, only one fawn survived.
“It was a horrible scene and sad to see,” said Trotta, a former cop who often stops at roadside incidents. “Life is so fragile.”
Janine Bendicksen, the director of Wildlife Rehabilitation at Sweetbriar, who quickly arrived at the scene estimates that the fawns were born about one week prematurely. She wrapped the surviving baby deer in a blanket and took the animal home and bottle fed it colostrum, the nutritious milk that mammals produce and mewborns typically get when they first nurse.
The next day, as fate would have it, Bendicksen noticed that a wild deer in the nearby woodlands had also just given birth.
“Deer typically don’t accept fawns from another doe,” Bendicksen said. “But we thought we would give it a try.”
The new mother approached the orphaned fawn and started licking and nurturing it. The doe then accepted the fawn as her own and let it nurse.
“We were all moved to tears,” Bendicksen said. “It’s a tragic story with a happy ending.”
Bendicksen, who has worked at Sweetbriar for 20 years, said that the rescue was one of the more remarkable experiences of her career.
A video of the Bendicksen bottle feeding the fawn can be found here.
Deer have made a mess out of the Long Island ecology.
It’s a sentiment shared by several federal employees working in multiple environmental departments. At a presentation held in the Port Jefferson Village Center April 11, Thomas Rawinski, who works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, said deer eat the saplings that would create new trees. They eat the bushes and flowers that would bring insects to the forests. And since they have no natural predators on Long Island, they multiply at an alarming rate.
“If your land is healthy, you can sit back and rest on your laurels,” Rawinski said. “If it’s not, like every damn forest on Long Island, then somebody has work to do, including me.”
Crowded into the Port Jefferson Village Center, residents of both the Village of Port Jefferson and Village of Belle Terre spoke about their own experiences with deer, but it all begs the question: What are the local villages going to do?
“I can tell you the level of deer damage on the east end is the worst I’ve seen in New York.”
— Thomas Desisto
The villages of Belle Terre and Port Jefferson have been working out the details on some sort of organized deer hunt, either a coordinated hunt or deer culling, one that could likely happen at the Port Jefferson golf course.
“It’s either going to be a controlled hunt or it’s going to be a cull,” Port Jeff Mayor Margot Garant said. “I don’t know which way we’re going to go but we’re going to figure it out.”
Talks have been ongoing since January, where both Garant and Belle Terre Mayor Bob Sandak have expressed their intent to split the cost of a deer culling, which would likely be performed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This would involve a specialized team of hunters using thermal imaging and silenced rifles to kill deer from elevated positions at night. The cost could be expensive, with some estimates as high as $1,000 per deer.
Thomas DeSisto, a wildlife specialist with the USDA said the operation is mandated to charge for their services, as they get all their funding through cooperative service agreements. While the cost hasn’t deterred the mayors from finding a solution, DeSisto said there are issues with performing a culling on Long Island due to regulation by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation.
In 2017, new legislation has restricted hunting to the point that DeSisto said fundamentally restricts the culling process. In Suffolk County, hunting is restricted to bows, or to muzzle-loaded rifles during the January hunting season. In addition, hunters are not allowed to keep loaded firearms within vehicles, use of bait is not allowed within 300 feet of a roadway, and hunters are not allowed to discharge firearms from the road.
“We’ve seen about 50 percent decrease in efficiency in our upstate program, and on Long Island we’ve seen a 75 percent decrease in efficiency,” he said. “I can tell you the level of deer damage on the east end is the worst I’ve seen in New York.”
In January, Belle Terre changed its village code to allow hunting within the premises, saying they had received an opinion by the state attorney general who said that no municipality other than New York State could regulate hunting.
While some village members shared fears of hunting going on so close to their homes, and shared a general distaste for killing animals, Sandak said so far, the change in code, and the facilitating of hunters, has been a success. He estimates since the village allowed hunting approximately 100 deer have been killed.
“Five years ago, if you were in your car and you saw a deer, you took out your phone and took a picture of it, because it was an oddity,” Sandak said. “Now, it’s unbelievable.”
The New York State DEC allows residents to apply for Deer Damage Permits, which allow property owners to hunt or allow hunters outside of the normal season. The Belle Terre mayor said to his knowledge there are three residents in Belle Terre with DDPs.
“Five years ago, if you were in your car and you saw a deer, you took out your phone and took a picture of it, because it was an oddity.”
— Bob Sandak
Port Jefferson currently has code on the books that says discharging any kind of firearm, bow or crossbow is strictly prohibited. Garant said village officials are still looking at changing the code so it will allow hunting, conforming to what the state attorney general has said. However, she added the village could not and would not go after residents who break the code and allow hunting on their own property.
Sue Booth Binczik, wildlife biologist with the New York Department of Wildlife Conservation, spoke to those who attended the meeting, echoing Rawinski by saying deer lead to reduced diversity, more invasive plants and fewer canopy and trees.
Deer are perhaps the most efficient devastators of the local ecology. For one, they have prolific breeding patterns. Binczik said does can start to breed at 1 year old and can give birth to two fawns per year in May and June. While deer are naturally prey animals, Long Island shows a distinct lack of natural predators to cull their numbers. An average deer can live to be 20, and while vehicles and hunters may start to pick off the occasional deer, stags can mate with any number of females, ever increasing the population. The only things left to kill the deer are recreational hunters, starvation, but especially moving vehicles.
“Under ideal conditions the deer populations can double every two to three years,” she said. “The reason they have this high reproductive rate is because they’re a prey species.”
State DEC regulations require that hunters only use a bow and arrow and only during the hunting season, barring a DDP permit. Hunters must also shoot 150 feet away from any structures with a bow, and of course they are not allowed to trespass onto other residents’ property without permission.
Binczik said there are means to get a community involved by completing a “controlled hunt,” which would require each individual homeowner to give permission for the village to hunt on their property. Those participating community members would come together to decide on a set of rules for any hunters participating, including the qualifications of the hunters and the times the hunters would be allowed out.
“There have been communities in upstate New York that have been running for controlled hunts for decades, and they have been very happy with it,” she said.
Despite all these efforts, Rawinski remains skeptical. He said it comes from years of seeing the damage that deer have caused to the local wildlife. People, he said, have to wake up to it. While by the roadside it may seem the forests are blooming with green, but it’s a symptom of what he called the “great green lie,” that while it may seem the forests are lush, on the ground, there’s not much left.
“It’s hard to come by solutions, especially in this suburban situation,” he said. “Humans have a can-do attitude, but I have to tell you, we’re up against our match. I don’t hate deer. I hate what people have let them do to the ecosystem.”
The Village of Belle Terre has moved to allow hunting in the village limits, saying the village code that restricted it was illegal in the first place.
Chapter 95 of the Belle Terre village code, specifying hunting and firearms, forbade any person for hunting, trapping or discharging firearms within village limits. In a meeting Jan. 15, the village board voted unanimously to remove it from the code and now it defaults to New York State law and Department of Environmental Conservation regulations regarding to hunting.
Belle Terre Mayor Bob Sandak said nine months ago the village board announced to the community it had received an opinion letter from the attorney general of the state of New York saying all hunting regulations are held by the state, and there is no room for local laws in contradiction to state laws.
“We’re just doing away with something that can’t be in the village code,” the Belle Terre mayor said. “It’s controlled by state legislature through the DEC. You’re not allowed to have codes that do not conform to state law.”
During the public discussion at the Jan. 15 meeting, many residents spoke out against taking away the code. Some said they felt the decision to remove the part of the village code was announcing to the public Belle Terre was open to hunting, though DEC regulations state hunters must be 150 feet from any structure, and they cannot trespass onto people’s property without permission.
Village resident Robin Marcel said she was concerned rogue hunters or poachers would be shooting arrows in the residential vicinity.
“How many arrows must I find in my backyard?” Marcel said. “There are certainly some good hunters out there, but not everyone is reputable.”
A number of residents reported seeing hunters carrying bows and arrows walking down residential streets. Others said they heard what might have been gunshots going off in the night. Some said they were afraid that deer injured by bows and arrows might leap fences and end up dying in people’s backyards.
DEC regulations specify hunting can only be done during the day, and the use of firearms like rifles or shotguns for deer hunting is prohibited on Long Island.
Sandak said he has only heard a single complaint about a deer dying in a resident’s backyard within the village, but that issue was cleared up quickly. He added the best way to deal with these illicit hunters was to contact either Suffolk County police or the DEC.
Village Attorney Eileen Powers repeatedly stressed village constables had no authority to arrest people for hunting, especially if the persons were invited onto the property by
the homeowner.
Kelvin Bryant, a member of East Quogue-based hunting advocacy group Hunters for Deer, attended the meeting and said while there were bad actors out there, his group’s members were all professionals who only kill deer from elevated positions, called tree stands, and would only shoot at a deer if it was 15 to 20 yards away max.
“Our guys are trained to take ethical shots,” he said.
Culling in Port Jeff and Belle Terre
In neighboring Port Jefferson village, discharging any kind of firearm, bow or crossbow is strictly prohibited by village code, but that may soon have to change if plans go through to perform a deer culling for both Belle Terre and Port Jeff. Sandak said the hunting would most likely happen at the Port Jefferson Country Club golf course.
Port Jefferson Mayor Margot Garant said she was currently working up an agreement with Belle Terre village over setting up a professional culling of the deer population in the area, though they are still working out the final details between the towns. Garant added there would be public meetings in the future on the subject of a professional deer culling, and the cost would be split between Port Jeff and Belle Terre 50/50.
“They’ll do it properly, and do it for a three-year period,” the Port Jeff mayor said. “Nobody will hear gunshots or see deer running around with arrows stuck in their backs.”
‘Nobody will hear gunshots or see deer running around with arrows stuck in their backs.’
— Margot Garant
The culling would be done through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has a special permit from the DEC to get around a number of normal regulations. The USDA officers would use silenced rifles, bait, and will do the culling only at night.
Sandak said Brookhaven National Laboratory recently completed a culling along its own property to hamper the tick population.
“They fired 331 bullets and killed 330 deer — I don’t know where the last bullet went,” Sandak said. “Their tick population was reduced by 50 percent.”
Belle Terre Trustee Jacquelyn Gernaey said she was initially against the idea of a culling due to the cost, which she said could be as high as $1,000 a deer.
Sandak said in the near-mile radius of the village bounds there could be as many as 300 deer. While he does not expect to bring that number down to the appropriate number of deer for the area, only around 20, he does expect a culling could bring it down to approximately 50. Though he added it may be needed every two years to keep the total population down.
Hunting incidents in the two villages
Some hunters in the Belle Terre and Port Jefferson area are taking the deer population problem into their own hands, sometimes using illegal means.
Village Trustee Stan Loucks said he heard gunshots outside his home along Soundview Drive the morning of Jan. 7.
They were only small, short shots of small caliber handgun, which went off around 7:30 in the morning, Loucks said the day after the event. When light broke, he went outside to investigate, and near his backyard, which borders on the territory of the Village of Belle Terre, he found a small pool of deer entrails lying on the ground. The carcass was gone.
“It was a popgun, it was close, and they were quick,” Loucks said. “It was a fresh kill.”
Hunting for deer is limited to bows and arrows on Long Island, according to the DEC.
Loucks called the DEC, and he said they arrived within the hour. The DEC officer came back with a hunting dog, but he could not pick up a scent of the hunters.
Garant said other residents within the village have complained of hearing firearms near their homes in the recent past.
While the investigation is still ongoing, Loucks has his own theory of what happened. He said he believes the hunters injured the deer with a bow and arrow and then, after tracking it to near his backyard, finally killed it with a handgun.
Garant said she spoke to the DEC officer assigned to the case who informed her there might be poachers in the area, and she has heard details in the past of hunters who had decapitated deer and left them on the golf course. At the Jan. 7 Port Jeff village board meeting, Garant and village trustees discussed putting up signs near the golf course expressing the penalties for hunting within the village limits.
Sandak was shocked to hear about Loucks encounter with hunters near his property and said it was completely illegal to use a firearm to hunt deer with a gun instead of the mandated bow and arrow.
Fears of hunters in the Port Jefferson area are not unfounded, especially that of animals injured by arrows stampeding onto resident’s property.
Spokesperson for the New York DEC Bill Fonda said there have been two other complaints of hunting activities in Port Jeff village this hunting season. One was at a home on Prospect Street filed, Nov. 28, 2018, related to a deer being found on a person’s property with two arrows lodged in it. On Dec. 5, 2018, another homeowner filed a complaint that related they saw a hunter with a bow stalking in the vicinity of Oakwood Road. The DEC has not had any waterfowl hunting complaints in Port Jeff village this season.
Individuals with general questions relating to hunting should contact DEC’s Wildlife Office at 631-444-0310. Those with concerns relating to hunting safety should contact DEC’s Environmental Conservation officers at 631-444-0250.
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