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Politics & Government

Controversy Over Deer Cull Continues

The third annual deer hunt in the South Mountain Reservation is slated to begin on Jan. 19.

The contentious deer hunt on South Mountain Reservation is slated to return for the third year in a row this January, and so too is the controversy surrounding the culling of the reservation’s ungulate population.

“They want habitat for birds and not deer, but to choose one species over another is just unconscionable,” said Janet Piszar, founder of Humane Essex County and Humane Milburn. “The forest is the deer’s natural home; it’s where they belong.”

Piszar, one of many who oppose the hunt, said that she plans to “make sure” that the hunt is an issue next year when County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo, Jr. runs for re-election.

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DiVincenzo, who gave the hunt the green light, said it's necessary to cull deer in order to give small plants and shrubs at South Mountain a chance to regenerate, which would create habitat for birds and other animals and help prevent erosion of the hills by holding the soil together.

“Our forest is being destroyed,” he said.

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He said that the county has spent close to $1 million to restore native vegetation in the reservation and that those plants are imperiled by hungry deer.

Daniel Bernier, who works for the Union County Parks Department and was contracted by Essex County for wildlife management, said that a healthy forest should have around 20 deer per square mile. South Mountain, he estimates, has 35 per square mile. With more than 200 deer killed in 2008 and around 80 killed in 2009, he said he’s hoping around 50 can be culled this year.

Darlene Yuhas, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Environmental Protection, which authorized the culling, called the program “community based deer management.”

“We call it culling so as to not confuse it with regular hunting,” she said.

While Bernier said the goal of 20 deer per square mile is optimal for forest maintenance, he added that in future years the county may look to cull a few more deer in order to allow vegetation on South Mountain to regenerate.

“The lower edge of the tree canopy is gone, as are the seedlings; they’ve been eaten by the deer,” he said. “If the population doesn’t get under control, this forest is going to disappear.”

Still, West Orange resident and deer activist Carol Rivielle worries about the hunt’s impact on another animal species that roams the more than 2,000-acre reservation: humans.

Even though the rules of the hunt state that hunters must fire at the animals from deer stands at least 20 feet up in trees, in order to ensure that the shots are angled downward, Rivielle worries that if a deer is only wounded, a hunter could climb down and try to kill it with a horizontal shot. She points out that in November 2008, a baby girl in Monticello, N.Y., was killed by a hunter who shot a deer from a stand, and then climbed down and fired a second shot, which tore through a trailer.

She points out that many of the deer harvested in the South Mountain hunt were killed with more than one shot.

Both DiVincenzo and Bernier stress that the hunters must go through a screening process to hunt on the mountain. They must all have more than five years of experience hunting whitetail deer, pass a marksmanship test, attend an orientation, and new hunters must be paired with veteran hunters, Bernier said.

There would be no more than 12 hunters on the reservation at any one time, Bernier said.

DiVincenzo cites the lack of incidents for foes of the hunt to point to as proof of its safety.

“Animal rights people would rather not see this happen, and they put a red flag up there and try to alarm people that their safety is in jeopardy,” he said. “But we proved the last two years that there’s nothing to worry about. We have not had one incident.”

Both Piszar and Rivielle say they would prefer the county to manage the deer population with a new contraceptive called GonaCon. However, DiVincenzo and Bernier say they don’t believe the contraceptive would work on a wild, free-ranging deer population such as the one on South Mountain.

The hunt is slated to begin on Jan. 19 and continue every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon for three weeks. It will only be held in the afternoon this year, Bernier said, because the vast majority of deer culled in the previous two hunts were taken in the afternoon.

South Mountain will be closed on days when hunting is taking place.

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