No deer management at Stony Creek, this year

By Kristyne E. Demske
C & G Staff Writer

SHELBY TOWNSHIP — A program that’s been in place since the 1999-2000 hunting season is taking a break this year, leaving the deer herds at Stony Creek Metropark be for the first time in more than five years.

“We are not … conducting any deer management programs this year in any of the metroparks,” said Denise Semion, chief of communications for the Huron-Clinton Metroparks.

The year she’s referring too constitutes the deer-hunting season, which runs from the fall of one year through the winter of the next, in this case the fall of 2007 into the winter of 2008. The program began in the fall of 1999 when bow and gun hunters were given special permission to help cull the deer herds at certain metroparks, and then rangers would use sharpshooters after the season ended to finish the job during January and February.

“The decision was made last summer that we would not cull any deer,” she said. “We have found that we could take a year off and reassess the population.”

Paul Muelle, chief of natural resources at Huron-Clinton Metroparks, said they have to keep an eye on the deer population each year to make sure it doesn’t take out too many of the parks’ other resources.

“We are looking at managing entire ecosystems. Trying to maintain biodiversity within those systems,” he said. “To do that, you take a look at all those things that affect that system, and over the years, we have seen quite a large negative effect” from the deer.

Semion said they conduct annual aerial surveys of the population each February, but the 2007 survey was not deemed very reliable because of the lack of snow on the ground and patchy fog that made it difficult to see exactly how many deer were in the park.

Nevertheless, the park authority estimated the 2007 deer population for Stony Creek at 168, giving a density of 27 deer per square mile. Park officials prefer to have a density of 15 to 20 deer per square mile, but that number was down from the 2006 estimate of 226 deer in the park.

“We’d like to have the population at about 124 deer, total,” Semion said. “The deer, whenever we do a deer count, we’re only doing a snapshot of the number of deer at the time. The deer come and go into these parks from the surrounding areas.”

After the aerial count is done, Muelle said, they take a look at the number of females and use their normal reproductive rate to estimate the population for the upcoming year.

“We compare what our estimation may be to what we feel the carrying capacity of the park may be,” he said.

He said staff members look at various indicator plants for clues to the health of the ecosystem and use that information to decide how much the herd needs to be cut down each year.