purchase Latuda online Going around town speaking with people I’ve encountered a fair amount of resistance to my claim that the local deer population is too high, and I’d like to go into this issue a little deeper.
cheap clomid online First of all, I’m aware of the history: many of the flatter areas in our hills were pastureland not long ago, and over a lot of those old pastures today you find new forest, much of it around 40 years old, of mostly red maple. I have such a plot on my own property. While those new forests were coming in, there was abundant deer browse and the local deer population exploded. The deer population was much higher twenty years ago than it is now. But simply because the deer population used to be larger does not mean the current population is sustainable now.
To gauge the deer population you have to look at their food supply. If the deer population is low you will be able to tell that by an abundance of browse species in the area. If the deer population is low fenced areas will look almost like unfenced areas. Precisely the opposite is the case in the Town of Denning. Browse-size tree, shrub, and forb species are almost absent from our forest – and I use that word with the greatest deliberation – anywhere deer can get to. For one gentleman who told me that the deer population was too low, I offered him a challenge – and I offer it to anyone else: send me pictures of 4-6 foot black cherry, maple, ash, witch hazel, or oak specimens from the town. I bet the number in the entire town is less than the number of registered voters, and they will all be in places that deer, for whatever reason, do not frequent. Post the pictures here, or post them on the town website. I don’t think they can be found.
Some people have responded to this, “well, they can’t grow because there’s no light, we need to thin the forest.” Each time I’ve had nearby a field I can point to, and the fields have plenty of sunlight and still, absolutely no cherries, maples, ashes, or oaks. Witch hazels don’t grow in full sun and don’t need it but I don’t see any that are under six feet tall. Light is emphatically not the issue. In fact, cutting is a sure way to get rid of the forest entirely: with deer populations at current levels, a cut field does not need to be brush-hogged. On Wildcat Mountain we have several fields that are not cut, are lined with cherries and maples which dump millions of seeds into them every year, and not a single tree gets past the deer.
That’s the best indicator we have of the deer population. It’s high to the point of not being sustainable, and to the point of being seriously detrimental to every other species in the forest. At the very least, this is an area that hunters should be allowed to take does out of. Current state management is not allowing doe tags this year, “as usual,” and state management admits that they have never reached their target buck levels (3 bucks per square mile, current take is 1.2), without ever considering that their target quotas may be inappropriate for the area.
Under current state management, 72% of New York’s forests will not regenerate, including our local forests. Cornell University has been working on this problem, and a good summa of it can be found here.
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