http://www.fairfieldweekly.com/article.cfm?aid=11086


The Quiet Kill
WhiteTail Solutions thins the herd in the suburbs without waking up the neighborhood

Thursday, December 25, 2008
By Nick Keppler

Four deer were lazily hanging out in Joe Tucker's yard, right along his driveway. They did not gallop away when I pulled in. "That's part of the problem," Tucker's buddy Dan Beyer told me later. "They've lost their fear of man as a predator."

This is why WhiteTail Solutions, a group of "deer management consultants" and bow hunters based out of Joe Tucker's home in Oxford, exists. And this is why the company is most active in the affluent suburbs, areas the state Department of Environmental Protection has deemed troublesome for their abundance of deer and lack of hunters. Ninety-nine percent of their hunts, says Tucker, who co-owns the company with his brother Chris and Beyer, occur in Fairfield County.

Man isn't much of a predator here. Deer hunting "is not a way of life" along the Gold Coast, says Patricia Sesto, chair of the Fairfield County Municipal Deer Management Alliance and director of Environmental Affairs for the Town of Wilton. "People haven't grown up with it and aren't educated about it ... It's just not our pastime."

Land here has been developed in a way — golf courses and wetlands separating office parks — that leaves open space where deer can eat well and breed plentifully, says Howard Kilpatrick, the DEP's biologist in charge of deer management.

When the deer population increases, so do Lyme disease, car collisions and ecological damage.

The number of deer per square mile reaches 60 in some parts of Connecticut, says Kilpatrick. While he says it's difficult to say how many are "too many" for this type of terraine, his educated guess is closer to 10 per square mile.

So, there's WhiteTail Solutions, a company headed by 40-year-old commercial well-driller Joe Tucker. "Company" may be the wrong word for it. Though it's a registered LLC, WhiteTail Solutions is more like 14 guys who love to hunt, who were raised hunting, who "harvest" deer in towns where guys spend more time bagging Wall Street bucks than hoofed ones.

They do not make a profit for most of their jaunts. (They do love to hunt.) Most of their hunts are allowed by private property owners who, warned by the town and the DEP about deer overpopulation, allow it. Sometimes town governments call them. Sometimes a group of neighbors does.

The hunters are amiable, bearded, middle-aged men who choose their words carefully. They live in places like Watertown, Terryville and Beacon Falls, but will gladly handle the problem of deer overpopulation (if you consider it a problem) in suburbs like New Canaan, Ridgefield and Wilton.

You don't hear them. You rarely see them. Although they are all quick with a rifle, they use bow and arrow when they hunt in the wealthy suburbs, because a 500-foot range is required for rifle-hunting and because archery is efficient. Beyer speaks happily about fiberglass arrows and state-of-the-art bows that can launch an arrow at speeds of 300 feet per second.

But they also want to be sensitive to the people whose backyards they're hunting, says Tucker. Arrows are "quiet and travel the distance you'd need if you're hunting the number of acres we need," says Tucker. Guns, he says, have a nasty cultural connotation, adding that "nobody ever died from an arrow on CSI: Miami."

I went on a small hunt with Beyer and Tucker on a piece of privately owned property in Ridgefield one bright Saturday morning. We traveled down one of Ridgefield's main arteries, made two turns, parked on the side of a residential yard and walked about 100 feet into the woods. There sat a battery-powered, time-set feeder that spread corn onto the ground in regular intervals. Above us was a tree stand — a sturdy, one-person platform attached to a tree for an aerial view. This is how you hunt deer in the suburbs.

*

About five years ago, the group started in Ridgefield, the northernmost town on the Gold Coast. Median annual income for a household is $107,000 and the posh town center is often compared to that goldest town on the Gold Coast, New Canaan. Ridgefield also sits on the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains, is sparsely populated (around 700 people per square mile) and, says First Selectman Rudy Marconi, "ranked at number-one or close to the top of some survey of deer-auto accidents." So in 2004, the town decided to form a "deer committee" to address the problem.

"The DEP had told us about the deer overpopulation," says Marconi, "and it was pretty obvious from looking around that we had a lot. We started to trace it to other problems in town," including Lyme disease.

The WhiteTail guys had been hunting in Ridgefield for years — and now the town government and its residents not just welcomed them; they needed them. They've since branched out into Wilton, Danbury, Seymour, Newtown, New Canaan, Redding and recently Brookfield, where the town government itself contracted the archers.

The WhiteTail men are careful. Everyone in the partnership is insured. After I joined them in the field, Beyer reminded me to check for ticks when I got home. They are non-confrontational. They won't hunt a neighborhood if another hunter is already there. If a single neighbor objects they make no efforts to win over that neighbor. They are charitable. They've created a "Hunt to Feed" program that's gathered 1,500 pounds of deer meat this year, from WhiteTail guys and other hunters, and donated it to the Connecticut Food Bank. Before that they also provided meat to be served at fundraisers for Toys for Tots, the American Legion and other non-profits.

With one exception (a hunter from Newtown), none of them live in Fairfield County. They just hunt there.

*

The entirety of Fairfield County makes up Zone 11 of the DEP's Deer Management Zones. It and Zone 12, which stretches the rest of the coast from Milford to Stonington, are the problem zones of the 12 deer zones the DEP carves the state into.

Hunter surveys and aerial expeditions have detected the popularly given figure of 60 deer per square mile. So the DEP adopted a few "liberalizations" of hunting regulations to lower the deer count, says Dale May, director of the DEP's Wildlife Division.

The hunting season in most of the state runs Sept. 15 to Dec. 31, but extends until Jan. 31 in Zones 11 and 12. In these areas, you can use bait (like corn) and can harvest an unlimited number of antlerless deer — does and fawns — which are more important to increasing or maintaining a herd's number than a buck. You can't do any of this in the other 10 zones, which, except for Zone 3 (Hartford and the surrounding area), are largely rural. The DEP is also considering a "special crossbow season" for the two trouble zones.

"Deer have unlimited capacity to breed in these zones," says May. "They have no predators. Bobcats and coyotes are rare, and most of them could not take down a full-grown deer. They may be able to get away with an injured one or a fawn, but if they can get a woodchuck or a possum or a housecat, they won't even try for the deer ... The other predators, such as wolves and bears are gone, and aren't coming back."

Man is deer's biggest predator in this terrain, says May, and has been since the days of the Native Americans. But in the days of the financial sector commuter, they seem to have stopped.

Take Wilton, for example, a town where income averages $141,000 and breadwinners mostly commute to Stamford or New York. Wilton has 71 square miles of land and a comfortable density of 654 people per square mile. There are, says Sesto, nearly 70 deer per square mile. Only 37 hunting licenses and 66 dual hunting-fishing licenses were issued by the town clerk in 2007. And this is a town of 18,000 people. "And Wilton is hardly unique," says Sesto.

Lots of deer means auto wrecks. The DEP found more road kill per square mile in Fairfield County, which includes the Merritt Parkway, Routes 7 and 8 and other brisk but scenic roadways, than any other part of the state.
The precise number: 1.32 dead deer per square mile, compared to the state average of 0.52.

There's also Lyme disease, one of many bacterial diseases spread by tick-carrying animals like deer. Since 1996, 29,000 cases of Lyme disease have been reported to the DEP.

Yet, Lyme is a relatively new disease. It was discovered in 1975 in Lyme, Conn., which sits toward the end of Zone 11. Reliable diagnostics either haven't been developed or haven't been implemented, says Maggie Shaw, of the Newtown Lyme Disease Task Force. Shaw's entire family has been fighting Lyme since 1992, and it's caused years of fatigue, illness and developmental damage for herself, her husband and their three children.

The point is: Lyme is new, mysterious, devastating and associated with deer.

So what are the solutions to these problems?

Controlled hunts, the DEP says. Devil's Den Nature Conservatory in Weston was closed to the public on weekdays this fall to allow hunters to catch deer. Huntington State Park in Redding was opened for archery-only hunting, provided hunters stay away from one heavily used area. Setso has been orchestrating controlled hunts in Wilton around the Rock Lake and City Lake reservoirs over the last six years. She thinks the hunts will harvest 80 to 100 deer this year.

What's the solution when you don't have large state parks or protected resevoirs to serve a controlled hunt?

A WhiteTail Solution.

Or at least that's what the Selectmen Board of Brookfield, another 60-deer-per-square-mile town, decided. The town hired WhiteTail hunters to patrol three town-owned pieces of land.

"They are there in their tree stands, shooting razor-sharp arrows directly down," says First Selectman Robert Silvaggi, who adds that the town isn't paying the hunters. "The arrows travel only a few feet. They go right through the deer, and there's little chance of anyone getting hurt."

It wasn't accepted by the entire town. Silvaggi says that a town meeting last October discussing the hunt this fall revealed more people in support than against, but "you are always going to have some people who want to save Bambi."

*

While Joe Tucker laments the decline of hunting in Connecticut, Piscilla Feral celebrates it. "What happens when all these people die out?" asks the president of Darien-based Friends of Animals. "Haven't their children discovered video games and better things to do than mutilate a deer?"

"Unequivocally opposed to hunting," Friends of Animals makes its presence known at municipal meetings where controlled hunts are discussed, picketed Wilton's first WhiteTail hunt and was involved in the battle over Bluff Point State Park in Groton, a patch of land trapped between busy Route 1 and the Long Island Sound, where the DEP decides each year exactly how many deer there will be killed.

The larger problem, says Feral, is humankind. "Deer don't cause global warming, deer don't pollute rivers. Comapred to that, a little damage to some shrubbery is nothing." She adds, "The solution is birth control — sorry, Sarah Palin — but we've overpopulated and mismanaged this planet and we can't get indignant when some deer come into 'our' area."

As for the deer-to-vehicle collisions, "You'll notice they go up during hunting season when deer are running more from hunters." (Note: Hunting season does coincide with mating season when deer activity is already greater.) As for Lyme disease? "It seems ridiculous to me that you are going to get rid of this disease by eliminating one mammal."

Tucker wants nothing to do with people like Feral — no arguments, no debates, no encounters. WhiteTail isn't in the business of changing minds, he says. If a new owner moves into a property in a neighborhood where they've been hunting, they leave.

"There are some people you are never going to convince and I'm okay with that," he says. "I'm a very choice kind of guy. If you don't want hunters around you or your property, I respect that. I only want that you respect the rights of the owners who are okay with that."

When asked if he's ever had any encounters with the animal-rights crowd, Tucker, as always, is careful with his words, but his eventual answer is "no."

"I try to avoid that confrontation before it even happens," he says. "It's a no win sort of thing."

He does make a brief comment about the middle-of-the-road peple in suburbia. "You don't need Bambi, you don't need a dead deer to make people uncomfortable," he says. "It's the camouflage and the trucks and the equipment. I get a lot of [landowners] who were uncomfortable having us come down at first and then they become okay with it and we wave to each other and sometimes they tell me [about their initial indecision], 'I just wasn't used it.'"