What to do about deer?

By Ben Orcutt - borcutt@nvdaily.com

FRONT ROYAL -- While some residents of the Jamestown Road area are concerned about the abundance of deer in their neighborhood, they're not quite sure what can be done about it.

"I don't know what the town can do, if anything," said David Wines, who has lived on Jamestown Road for 41 years and can remember when it was not paved to John Marshall Highway. "I don't even know if it's a solvable problem, to tell you the truth. I guess maybe it's something we'll have to live with. We've been living with it for three or four years."

Wines said over the past few years, the deer have become more numerous and he has counted between 60 to 70 animals in the neighborhood on one occasion. He said he and his wife limit the flowers they plant because of the deer. Wines surmises that one of the problems is that some people feed the deer.

"There's times that we can't back out of our driveway with [the deer] wandering," Wines said.

Anne Wilson, 69, who has lived in the area since 1971, said she's not sure what can be done about the deer either.

"They walk right down the road," Wilson said. "The thing is, we've taken over their habitat and so I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. I feel sorry for them. I certainly don't feed them and they are overpopulated. There's no place for them to go. I think it's a concern. I really don't know what they can do."

Shannon McCaffrey, 51, who has lived on Jamestown Road for 14 years, also is familiar with the situation.

"Right now, as I know it, we have two bucks, three does and four fawns that live out back," he said. "But we usually see 10 deer or so that cross this road because they go over into this field [across the road] at night. We have seen three deer hit just right here and I'm sure there's deer all through the neighborhood. You just have to be careful, but they are here."

McCaffrey thinks the town should take some action.

"Because if not, what'll happen is the population will overgrow what they can eat and they'll become diseased and we don't want disease in the neighborhood," he said.

Longtime Jamestown Road resident John Taylor, 79, suggests that the town consider inoculating the deer so females can't become pregnant. Taylor said the method was used some time ago in the Washington area with success.

"The problem automatically disappeared over a period of time," Taylor said. "It would work."

However, Fred Frenzel, a district biologist with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, says studies indicate that inoculation against pregnancy is not as effective with a free-ranging deer herd.

"The best thing is just to remove some deer and reduce the population," Frenzel said, adding that Front Royal could apply for a permit to allow police to shoot some of the deer, which would be given to a charity, or the town could apply for a permit to allow for an urban archery season, as Winchester has done.

Frenzel said that just because a deer herd is large does not mean disease is imminent.

"But if a disease does show up in a denser population, it's going to spread more rapidly," he said. "A dense deer herd is bad for several reasons. There's only so much food to go around."

The ball is in the town's court, Frenzel said.

"It's up to them to decide what they want to do," he said.

Mayor Timothy W. Darr said he's seen the deer firsthand and also has spoken with Wines about the problem. Darr said Town Manager J. Michael Graham and town staff are looking into options on how to handle the situation.

"This is a very sensitive public issue with most citizens strongly falling either on one side or the other," Graham says in a Thursday e-mail. "It seems to be a no-win situation that some part of the citizen population will not be happy with any decision concerning the deer issue. For this reason, the Town staff is currently researching options and alternatives by contacting other localities and attending [a] Virginia Municipal League (VML) conference in Oct. in hopes to find a good alternative for our community. Staff will be presenting our finding sometime after the conference."