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FROM
The New York Times
September 22, 2017
In a quiet patch of thorny wineberry bushes on Staten Island, a
white-tailed deer snored loudly, oblivious to the team of humans gathered
around him.
For the two young does that looked on from a distance, it must have been a
peculiar sight: One of the deer’s legs was roped up to a tree, his eyes were
covered in blue fabric, and a tube in his snout delivered oxygen from a
tank.
Nathan Kotschwar, a veterinarian, knelt on the dirt ground and quickly
performed a vasectomy – slicing, stitching and stapling the deer’s
hindquarters in less than 15 minutes.
The operation in Butler Manor Woods on a recent Tuesday was part of an
effort by New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation to reduce
Staten Island’s growing deer population by sterilizing every male deer in
the borough.
After the surgery, the deer’s ears were tagged with a number — 804 — and,
about 25 minutes later, he woke up and groggily stumbled into the bushes.
By then, Mr. Kotschwar, who left the sleeping animal in the care of a
colleague, was long gone.
“I’m going to go find the next one,” he had said, before disappearing into
the woods.
In deer sterilization programs in cities across the country, including
Cincinnati, Ann Arbor, Mich., and in Hastings-on-Hudson, the does are
usually targeted for surgical or chemical sterilization, or rendered
temporarily infertile with contraception drugs. The experiment in Staten
Island is the first in the nation to try and cull the population solely
though vasectomies, according to City Hall.
If successful, the experiment could serve as a model for other
metropolitan areas overrun by deer.
“People said it was just not logistically possible to capture this many deer
and sterilize them,” said Sarah Aucoin, chief of education and wildlife for
the city’s parks department. “But we can tell you that it’s not logistically
impossible. We are reaching the number of deer we were hoping for.”
The city oversaw 720 vasectomies last year, when the project launched, and
they estimate that about 92 percent of the sexually active male deer on the
island were sterilized. Last month, a six-person team began searching for
the remaining adult bucks, as well as younger males, which they estimated to
be about 250 in August.
For years, environmental officials and local leaders, including the Staten
Island borough president, have said that the increased deer population was a
nuisance and health hazard. Deer can put drivers in dangerous situations
during the fall mating season, when the frisky animals cross roads in search
of a mate. Last year, the Health Department confirmed 93 new cases of Lyme
disease in Staten Island, a record high, and residents have complained about
chewed-up flower beds and gardens. The parks department has fenced off parks
and planted deer-resistant vegetation to keep the city’s greenery out of the
mouths of hungry deer.
The parks department first began receiving regular reports of deer in the
borough in 2000. With no natural predators, and hunting outlawed in the
city, the population grew rapidly. The department estimates there are now
about 2,000 deer on Staten Island — in 2008, a study by the state counted
24.
In 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio assembled an interagency task force to deal
with the deer. Last year, the parks department hired White Buffalo, a
nonprofit organization led by Anthony DeNicola that works to conserve native
species and ecosystems, to perform the vasectomies as part of a research
project. The nonlethal experiment to reduce the deer population will cost
the city $3.3 million over three years.
Because bucks can travel great distances to breed, sterilizing them requires
covering a lot of ground. So cities with deer sterilization programs have
mostly focused on sterilizing the female deer, which are more stationary.
But on Staten Island, Dr. DeNicola saw an opportunity to do something
different.
Namely, because it is an island, finding all of the males is possible, Dr.
DeNicola, said.
The borough’s suburban geography also helps. Dr. DeNicola and his team
cannot chase deer through backyards or dart them in populated areas.
Instead, he waits for them to arrive at bait sites in wooded areas
throughout the island.
“A family of females is social,” he said, meaning they travel in a group.
“So after I shoot one, the others will watch her tip over. They learn pretty
fast that this bait ain’t so good.”
Over time, he said, the females will learn to avoid the traps. But the
bucks, which usually travel solo, almost always take the bait.
Also, he said, a vasectomy is less invasive and easier to execute than
female sterilization.
That is not to say, though, that the parks department’s experiment in
vasectomies is without problems.
“With any deer fertility control study, once you’ve started it, then
there has to be constant maintenance for the foreseeable future,” said Paul
Curtis, a professor at Cornell University and an expert on community-based
deer management.
Even if 99 percent of the males are sterilized, he added, “you’re still
going to see some immigration on the island.”
“So the question is,” he said, “can you get those new males when they first
arrive and catch them efficiently and get them sterilized before they
impregnate too many does?”
Dr. Curtis said the program on Staten Island also might not solve one of the
borough’s immediate problems with the deer: car accidents.
“Typically deer vehicle accidents peak in November during the peak of the
rut,” he said, using a term for the mating season. “Once the rut’s done, the
number of accidents falls off pretty quickly in a normal herd.”
But if the females continue the mating season into late winter, he said,
“there’s definitely the potential for an increased number of deer-vehicle
collisions, particularly in January and February when the does continue to
cycle.”
Dr. DeNicola disagrees. He believes the males determine the mating season.
Come winter, when their testosterone levels drop, they will stop chasing the
females around the island as they normally would, he said. “I just have to
prove that.”
But even Dr. DeNicola will admit that the Staten Island experiment has its
challenges.
Like traffic, for example. Getting one of the two veterinarians on staff to
an unconscious deer in the car-dependent borough before the drugs wear off
can be tough, he said.
And in the big city, the veterinarians must be flexible.
“After you dart a deer, they can run three or four hundred yards before it’s
going to be down,” Dr. DeNicola said. His team operates on them where they
fall: in industrial parks, cemeteries, or near the side of the road.
In the past, Dr. DeNicola and his team would sometimes carry the deer to a
car and then drive them to a trailer for the surgery, before releasing them
where they were knocked out. So far this year, his team has performed all
the operations in the field, which he said is easier on his team, both
logistically and physically.
If the program is successful and all the male deer on the island are
sterilized, the population is expected to drop by 10 to 30 percent every
year, Ms. Aucoin said. Once most of the male deer are sterilized, a program
would need to be established to vasectomize any deer that may swim over from
New Jersey, where the borough’s deer are thought to have originated.
The goal is not eradicating the deer from the island, she said: “We are
looking to move the population to a sustainable level.”
“There’s an ecological carrying capacity, but there’s also a social carrying
capacity,” Ms. Aucoin added. “How much do people want to see deer? How much
of these impacts are they willing to live with?”
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