Reducing Deer Populations For Healthy Forests And People

I’ve talked some about his subject from a couple different perspectives. In Pennsylvania, the state is in the middle of a major deer population reduction in order to regrow the forests. According to reports from studies and officials, there are areas where too many deer have destroyed the natural under story of the forest allowing for growth of invasive plant species. Read more

Fort Thomas debates deer hunt

AMANDA JOERING | AJOERING@NKY.COM

FORT THOMAS - Fort Thomas City Council is still not sure exactly what the city’s deer hunt this year will be like.

At a meeting Monday, May 19, the council again discussed possible changes to the archery ordinance that was passed last December.

The council members agreed that eligible properties for discharging an arrow must be at least three acres and that the setback on both sides between the shooter and a neighboring property should be raised from 50 to 100 feet.

Everyone also agreed that the hunting should be limited from Nov. 1 to Nov. 21 and Jan. 1 until the end of the hunting season, which was Jan. 21 last year. This year’s end date is not yet determined.

The hunt will also be limited to the hours of 6 a.m. to noon.

“We have had people say they don’t feel safe walking, so if we limited the time, people will know when hunting is not going on,” said City Administrator Donald Martin.

Council also discussed posting a map of the eligible properties, which Martin said for the most part are on the outskirts of the city, on the city’s Web site and at the city building.

The council was split on whether it would be best to require property owners who are allowing hunting on their land to register with the city and whether adjoining property owners should be notified.

Martin said he worries that the more requirements like this that the ordinance includes, the less likely people will be to participate, which would make the program not work.

“With the restrictions of the property size, we have solved the biggest safety issues,” said councilman Eric Haas.

Councilwoman Barbara Thompson-Levine said she is in favor of the registration and notification because it adds an extra layer of safety to the ordinance.

Fort Thomas residents Patrick and Kathy Williams, who attended the meeting, said they are scared for children to be around their house, which is surrounded by eligible properties.

Children, Patrick Williams said, don’t know what no trespassing means.

“I grew up in Fort Thomas,” said Kathy Williams. “We used to go from one end of this city to the other through those woods.”

Kathy said she thinks the registration and notification are good ideas to give people more warning of when hunting may be going on.

The original ordinance allowed for hunting on private property with the owners consent from Dec. 27, 2007 to Jan. 21 of this year. Hunters, who weren’t required to report kills, reported 42 deers killed.

No injuries or accidents involving archery were reported during that time.

The council is revisiting the ordinance to give residents, many who spoke out against the hunt, peace of mind to help them feel safe in the city, said councilman Roger Peterman.

The council will continue to discuss the changes at a later meeting, which has not yet been set.

Martin said he expects to have a draft of the amended ordinance sometime in June.

Little dog nearly lunch for adaptable coyote Encounters become more common

Bentley, a 2-year old Chihuahua owned by Jessica Ganchou of Bethlehem, is luckly to be alive after he was mauled and nearly killed by a coyote earlier this year. (Jim Shannon / RA)

Bentley the longhaired Chihuahua has a second chance at life thanks to a 9-volt battery, a loving owner and two skilled veterinarians who put him back together after he was attacked by a coyote.

The lap dog with the golden coat and diminutive body was romping behind his owner’s Bethlehem house at dusk Jan. 19 when a coyote snatched him. The coyote’s teeth pierced the dog’s flesh and clamped down as it headed for the edge of the yard.

Technology intervened. Bentley, who was wearing a battery-powered collar tuned to an electric fence in the yard, got an electrical shock as the coyote stepped over the metal wire. The charge zapped the coyote, which dropped Bentley and skulked away.

The little dog was lucky. Wildlife experts and veterinarians across Connecticut say the number of coyote attacks on pets, particularly small dogs like Bentley that appear as prey, has increased in recent years. Suburban sprawl is considered the biggest factor; homes built near hills and streams are in natural coyote habitat. Few disagree coyotes, which resemble small German shepherds, have become more aggressive, and are losing their innate fear of humans, as evidenced by the 2006 attack on two Washington, Conn., residents.

“The bottom line is coyotes are expanding into populated areas and perhaps into areas where pet owners are totally unsuspecting,” said Chris Vann, a wildlife biologist with the state Department of Environmental Protection. “They will protect their territories. If it can happen in the backyards of West Hartford and East Hartford, more populated areas, it can really happen anywhere.”

BY CHRIS GARDNER | REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

Deer romps through home but does little damage

BURRELL TOWNSHIP - Across the yard, through the pond, onto the porch and through the open door - that’s the path a young deer took to get into the house of Carl and Dena Wendel on Monday evening.

Their temporary house guest entered through their front door which was propped open at their home in the Smith Plan behind Pizza Hut along Route 22. No one was in the house at the time.

Dena was at a meeting at Blairsville High School when her husband called to tell her to come home.

“My husband was on the front porch. It ran right past my husband,” she said. “He saw it, but it wasn’t registering. It was unbelievable.”

The deer, which the Wendels believe was a yearling, trotted through the family’s kitchen, computer room and laundry room. Aside from some knocked-over water jugs, displaced dog dishes, a hole or two in the pond liner and some stray deer hairs, nothing was damaged.

“Other than making a mess, we were really lucky,” Dena said. “We have a huge 125-gallon fish tank when you first walk in the door. He ran right past that. Thank God.”

A group of neighbors came over to help figure out how to get the deer out of the house. They pounded on walls of the house to scare it into the garage, which was connected to the laundry room. Eventually, the deer made it to the garage and exited the house.

Dena estimated the deer spent about 15 minutes in her home, which is in an area the family does not consider a rural area.

“When I called my insurance agent, I’ve never seen him speechless,” Dena said. “I was talking to him and he was like, ‘Are you kidding?’”

In addition to avoiding major damage, the Wendels also avoided having a messier catastrophe on their hands - they share the house with three dogs. But Carl locked the dogs up outside the sliding glass door where they watched. The dogs were jumping on the door, wanting their own piece of the action.

“I was thinking, please don’t let them break that door,” she said. “I’ll have three dogs and a deer chasing each other around the house - I’m moving into a hotel.”

States Might Adopt Shed Hunting Seasons

Talk about a few bad apples spoiling the bushel.

Thanks to the actions of some hooligans, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho are considering enacting laws and seasons on the gathering of shed antlers from deer and elk.

According to published reports, wildlife officials from those states have seen an increase in activity from individuals who harass deer and elk in efforts to get them to shed their antlers prematurely. For example, in April, Nevada game officials apprehended a man who used an ATV to chase mule deer through sagebrush in attempts to get them to drop their antlers.

Montana has been dealing with this problem for several years, and has already implemented closed seasons on shed hunting in certain parts of its elk range. Fines for harassing deer and elk in that state can range up to $500 per violation.

Other reports include violations in Idaho where shed hunters were using off-road motorcycle to chase animals.

A date-specific shed-hunting season? Now I think I’ve heard it all.
–Dan Schmidt, Editor Deer and Deer Hunting

For deer hunting, board bans high-powered rifles

Change in Hunting Rules sought:

CHARLES CITY — The county Board of Supervisors voted 2-1 last night to prohibit deer hunting with high-powered rifles, drawing anger and raised voices from some in the audience.

“We’re going to get you out next term,” said Bill Johnson, addressing the board members.

Also last night, the three-member board unanimously adopted a $22.4 million county budget for fiscal 2009, which begins July 1. That is a nearly 4 percent decrease from the spending plan for the current fiscal year.

The county’s real estate tax rate is being raised by 7 cents to 82 cents per $100 of assessed value.

More than 100 people packed the auditorium at the Government and School Board Administration Building during last night’s public hearing on the rifle issue.

About 15 people spoke, with some in favor of hunting deer with high-powered rifles and others expressing safety concerns.

Several of those in favor suggested it was their right to hunt deer with rifles, or that the current practice of shooting from tree stands was relatively safe. A National Rifle Association representative said deer hunting was essential to controlling the deer population.

Vince Brackett said hunting with rifles is a tradition and it claims far fewer lives than boating in Virginia. “Boating’s far more dangerous,” he said.

Opponents of rifle hunting expressed concerns about stray bullets. One suggested that some hunters would be unable to resist shooting a deer even if they were on the ground and not in a tree stand.

Elbert Parker held a piece of inch-thick wood above his head to demonstrate the ease with which a bullet could go through someone’s wall.

“Your children can be shot dead looking at TV in your house,” he said, prompting an argument among him and members of the crowd until board chairman Gilbert A. Smith tapped on a table to quiet them.

Supervisors had three possible voting options.

The first two would have allowed people to continue hunting deer with high-powered rifles during general firearms season as long as they fired from at least 10 feet off the ground. Both added additional restrictions.

Supervisors Sherri M. Bowman and Timothy W. Cotman voted for the third option, the amendment that prohibits all deer hunting with high-powered rifles. Smith voted against it.

Last night’s vote reversed a decision made less than three years ago to allow deer hunting with rifles.

For that vote in 2005, Smith and then-supervisor Michael L. Holmes voted in favor, and Cotman against.

But Bowman unseated Holmes in this past November’s election, running on a platform that, in part, sought to rescind the use of rifles for deer hunting.

Bowman said after the board meeting that most of the residents who had talked to her about the issue had expressed safety concerns.

“It’s been trying,” she said. “You try to do what’s best and what’s fair.”

By REED WILLIAMS

TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

CT resident claims to have seen mountain lion

Mountain Lion’s Lair video - By News Channel 8’s Bob Wilson

By News Channel 8’s Bob Wilson
Posted April 21, 2008
11:05 PM

Wallingford (WTNH) _ Is there a mountain lion roaming the countryside in Connecticut? One Wallingford resident says yes. Environmental experts aren’t so sure. So, with this said, should people be worried?

Bob Heilnan, of Wallingford, was out working in his field when he saw an animal cross in front of him. It looked just like a mountain lion.

“It walked across the field this way, disappeared in here and that is the den. DEP was here and they say that is a den,” Heilnan noted.

But is it a mountain lion den? That is the question. Heilnan continued to describe what he saw. “About 3 and a half feet long, tan and the tail has a black tip. And, as it walks, the tail and the front legs move together.”

DEP says mountain lions are not native to Connecticut. They wanted Heilnan to get a picture of the animal. So, he called a friend who has a special wildlife camera, he mounted it next to the den in front of the animals path.

“The camera has been put in place and it’s a special camera with a motion sensor and flash so that any animal that walks in front of it will the picture of what ever animal lives in the brush.”

Beth Webb lives across from the den. She knows that everything from rabbits to wood chucks live nearby. But, a mountain lion?

“We are a little concerned to see what is out there, in the field and long as it’s nothing dangerous that’s okay,” Webb noted.

As for Heilnan, he knows what he saw and he knows that there aren’t supposed to be mountain lions in Connecticut. “This is Connecticut. I know I have deer. I know I have coyote. I know I have muskrats living in my pond. But when you stop and think about it — there is a lot of game for him and this is the perfect place for him.”

Ecological disaster brought reality check

Crude oil blasted nine stories into the air on Jan. 28, 1969, from a pipeline that blew out in the Santa Barbara channel. The offshore drilling operation spewed three million gallons of thick inky blue-black oil, grounding hundreds of thousands of birds, leaving them to die a slow death. The fish were luckier. They died fast. “The animals all need our help,” Jacob Thompson, a kindergartner says while standing on tiptoe at the Ansonia Nature Center to make eye contact with a turtle in a terrarium in Connecticut after hearing a bit about Earth Day’s ecological origins. “I worry about the animals — all of them — because they can’t survive with all the garbage outside. And I’m thinking the garbage is gonna kill all the animals — especially the metal cans because they have sharp edges that’ll cut them up.” “Or maybe, something worse,” Jacob whispers, his eyes widening behind his gold-wire rimmed glasses. “Maybe all the trash will just bury the animals alive.”

When the Santa Barbara pipeline burst 39 years ago, crude oil flowed for 10 days, eventually covering an 800-mile square area with a dark sheen. The oil even silenced the tide. With the viscous oil melded to it, the waves no longer lapped at the shore. Instead, they landed with a heavy thud.

For the environmental movement, this disaster was the spark that launched Earth Day, which is observed on April 22 with volunteer litter cleanups, symposia, protests and teach-ins at schools about the environment.

Connecticut was suffering its own environmental problems on the Naugatuck River around the time of the Santa Barbara incident. Some days, the water would run red. Other days, it was tinted a bright green or yellow. It depended on the chemicals that the factories that hugged its shores were discharging that day.

Former Environmental Protection Agency Region One Administrator Julie Belaga says the televised environmental disasters in California and on the Cuyahoga River in Ohio where the “water burst into flames from all the [industrial] chemicals” being discharged shocked the public.

Belaga, of Westport, co-chairs the Connecticut League of Conservation, and serves on the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Sustainability, a group advising the MTA on ways to become “greener” by boosting energy efficiency and reducing its carbon emissions.

“We’ve made some enormous progress since (the first) Earth Day and because of the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency,” says Belaga, who co-chairs the Connecticut League of Conservation. And there is certainly more that needs to be done, especially because of global warming and climate change.” “The environment and all its problems are very large, and it’s difficult for people to appreciate all this unless they can see the damage up close for themselves,” Belaga says. “That’s what these environmental disasters in Santa Barbara and Ohio did for people. It brought the damage to their living room. It turned them into witnesses and once you’ve seen this kind of disaster you can’t forget or ignore it.

“Back in the 1970s, we were at a point where our air pollution was actually visible,” Belaga says. “You could wipe your car with your hand and feel the grit from the air pollution on it. And you didn’t always have to be in a city to see this. The winds carried this sooty, gritty pollution for miles.” Connecticut newspapers like the Bridgeport Post and Telegram, the forerunners of the Connecticut Post, published air pollution indexes that listed some of the particles and metals circulating in the atmosphere.

In Connecticut, the first Earth Day featured community litter cleanups, a beachside vigil in Westport, where young and old gathered to hold hands and show solidarity with Mother Earth.

In Hartford, a Trinity College student, Joel Houston, deposited 37 pounds of soil for “safe keeping” at Connecticut Bank & Trust, “to dramatize the value of the earth.” The soil stayed put at the bank for a year in a series of safe deposit boxes. The Santa Barbara drilling explosion represents the first televised environmental disaster in history with millions of people witnessing dying birds, dead fish and aquatic plants washing up daily on the shore.

The idea for Earth Day was the brainchild of Gaylord Nelson, a senator from Wisconsin, who observed the disaster from the plane. He looked out his window and saw the oily sheen of the crude oil cripple and kill what it touched. He vowed to bring national attention to the plight of the environment with teach-ins and demonstrations, using some of the same techniques that worked for the civil rights and anti-war movements.

“It was a gamble,” Nelson told the Milwaukee Journal years later. “But it worked.”

Twenty million people across the country, including thousands of college students, turned out to protest the deterioration of the environment that first Earth Day. They called on the nation’s leaders to take action before it was too late to combat everything from oil spills, air pollution, toxic dumps, pesticide use, habitat and wildlife destruction.

When Earth Day debuted in 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency didn’t exist. Neither did the Clean Water Act. And neither did Connecticut’s Department of Environmental Protection. Corporations expressed no concern about the environment in the design or planning of their office parks.

Go to any zoning commission anywhere in Connecticut or most parts of the country nowadays and even the most environmentally recalcitrant developers are cognizant of the need to include trees, buffers, wetlands and habitat preservation into their projects. It’s the law.

“Ultimately, developers are finding that it’s just more cost effective and makes for a better development” when they take the environment into consideration, Fairfield’s Planning and Zoning Director Joseph Devonshuk Jr. says. “It’s just smarter to develop this way.”

A decade after the nation celebrated its first Earth Day, Fairfield was adopting new zoning regulations for mixed-use residential, retail and office complexes that went so far as to include a ratio for shade trees to parking spaces.

“It wasn’t just for aesthetics, although I do think it contributed to better-looking projects,” Devonshuk says, “it also was intended as a way of keeping cars cool” in the peak sun hours, which contributes obviously to using less air conditioning and lowering carbon emissions.

As Earth Day turns 38 — still young, but obviously middle aged, and while aspects of the environment have improved — thanks to recycling programs and reductions in particles released by power plants, industry and vehicles, environmentalists agree that more work needs to be done. This includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions, finding new alternative fuel sources that reduce our dependency on oil, especially foreign oil.

Concern in the 1980s centered on the final destination for the nation’s trash. Landfills were running out of space. Recycling became the law midway through the decade and 867,333 tons of newspapers, bottles and cans were being removed from Connecticut’s waste stream by 2006 as recyclables, according to the Northeast Recycling Council, which tracks recycling.

And still more of what Connecticut residents chuck out has been pulled out of the waste stream. In 1999, the Connecticut Resource Recovery Authority began recycling electronics, accepting everything from broken televisions, computers, even discarded cell phones. In its first year alone, 2.6 million pounds of electronics were recycled.

“The issue central today are reducing sources of pollution in the air, in the water and on land because of development,” Dennis Schain, spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection, says. “The bottom line is the lifestyle choices we make — about where we live, where we’ll work and how we get there have a direct bearing on our environment. It’s all interconnected.”

At the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which oversees Metro-North Commuter Railroad, efforts are under way to “green” the railroad. A 20-point list of recommendations unveiled by its Blue Ribbon Commission calls for MTA and Metro-North to derive seven percent of their energy needs by 2015 from solar, wind and other renewable sources. The proposal includes placing some solar panels at Metro-North stations in Connecticut, using wind turbines to fuel buses, and tidal energy too.

Donna Lindgren, director of the Ansonia Nature Center, believes people are more sophisticated — at times — in their environmental awareness.

In the 1970s, “there was no such issue as ‘global warming. That term wasn’t on the horizon. Now, people are aware of it,” she says.

Credit for this awareness, Lindgren says, is due to documentaries such as Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” media attention and television programs geared to the nonscientist.

Whether one believes in global warming or not, the term has seeped into mainstream conversation.

“It seems as though more people have an awareness about environmental problems and want to see more done to address them,” Lindgren says. The motivation however, does not always spring from direct concern for the environment. Rather it comes, Lindgren says, from their pocketbook. The biggest environmental problem that needs addressing, she says, “is where we get our food, where its grown and how far we have to go to get it — the farther it is, the more emissions we are putting into the atmosphere.”

For that reason, Lindgren is a big supporter of home-grown foods. From a garden in her backyard, she grows “heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, basil like there’s no tomorrow, squash and broccoli.”

There’s also been a recent push to eliminate the use of plastic bags.

In fact, Stephanie Cash, a mother who works for Shop Rite as a cashier, applauds a program that her supermarket chain launched recently to reduce plastic grocery bags in the waste stream.

“We give customers a three cent discount for every plastic bag they bring back and reuse instead of having us give them new ones,” Cash says. “I see a lot of our customers using their plastic bags over and over again. None of them mind. They think and we know that they are doing something good for the environment.”

Hoyt one of history’s best archers

GLENDALE - Ann Weber Hoyt was one of the finest female archers in history.

She won the International Field Archery Championship in 1959 and was the only woman ever to win both the USA National Target and Field championships, according to the Archery Hall of Fame.

She was among the first to be inducted into the Archery Hall of Fame in 1972. She managed the U.S. Olympic Archery Team in 1984, the same year she received the National Archery Association’s Thompson Medal of Honor.

Mrs. Hoyt died Saturday at the Glendale Center, where she had lived since early October.

Mrs. Hoyt, who turned 86 on March 29, suffered from dementia and a stroke.

Mrs. Hoyt was introduced to archery when she was 16 and a student at Bloomfield High School in Bloomfield, N.J., where she grew up. In 1939, she was ranked fourth in the country by the National Archery Association and won the National Archery Championship.

Mrs. Hoyt went to Montclair State Teachers College in New Jersey, graduating in 1943. She won four intercollegiate archery titles for Montclair.

In 1948, Mrs. Hoyt married Lloyd Corby, also one of the best archers in the country. They sometimes performed together, and he once shot a grapefruit off the top of her head at a charity event in Morristown, N.J. Corby died in 1958.

In 1971, Mrs. Hoyt quit her job at the Robin Hood Archery to marry Earl Hoyt, owner of Hoyt Archery. Mr. and Mrs. Hoyt sold the business in 1978 and continued to serve as consultants until 1991.

Mrs. Hoyt moved to Glendale in 2001 to live with her close friend and fellow archer Ann Clark following the death of her husband.

She has no survivors.

Visitation is 10-11 a.m. Wednesday, followed by Mass, at St. Gabriel Church, 48 W. Sharon Road, Glendale. A brunch will follow at the Glendale Gaslight Restaurant, 1140 Congress Ave. Mrs. Hoyt’s remains will be cremated and interred at the Archery Hall of Fame.

Memorials: National Archery Hall of Fame, 500 W. Sunshine St., Springfield, MO 65807, or Hospice of Cincinnati.

BY REBECCA GOODMAN | RGOODMAN@ENQUIRER.COM

More Funds for the DEP

Connecticut residents’ expectations for the environment — ample preserved lands, protected wildlife, healthy rivers, clean air, a vital state parks system — have soared in the last two decades. State funding for the Department of Environmental Protection’s programs has not.

That’s got to change.

The General Assembly’s appropriations committee is recommending a $4.5 million increase in the DEP’s budget for the next fiscal year. It’s a good and necessary start, even in a flagging economy. The DEP has been slowly starved for decades. Its bones are showing.

Severe and long-term staffing shortages have left the state’s parks languishing. The agency struggles (and fails) to keep pace with its regulatory duties, and performs less than half the inspections it did a decade ago.

Recycling programs are stalled. Projects to reduce sewage overflows into Long Island Sound are behind schedule. Farmland and open space preservation is lagging.

And those are just the current challenges.

Yet the level of state funding for environmental programs in Connecticut (adjusted for inflation) has stayed flat since 1972, the year the agency was created, according to a report by the state Council on Environmental Quality.

Today, federal money, bonding, permits and license fees account for nearly three-quarters of the DEP’s operating budget, according to the council. The agency’s slice of Connecticut’s general fund — 0.23 percent (about $10.29 per person each year) — is smaller than that of any neighboring state; New York’s environmental agency, which has the next lowest rate, gets 0.57 percent.

The DEP gives Connecticut residents a pretty good bang for their ten spot. Think what it could do with adequate funding.

By: The courant.com

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