That's the situation in Milford, Connecticut, where the owner of the local Honda dealership has asked the town for permission to put in a gravel road so he can hunt, with bow and arrow -- not on a remote tract deep in the woods but on a 100-by-100 plot behind his showroom.
In some parts of suburban Connecticut (backcountry Greenwich, in particular), it's estimated that as many as 68 white-tailed deer are crammed into each square mile (the best guess of deer density before European settlement is eight to 11 per square mile). Milford doesn't have Greenwich's expansive estates and expensive landscaping, which are paradise to deer, so I assume the density of its deer population doesn't match that in Greenwich.
But to have a deer problem there at all says something about how our land-use practices have made it easier for deer to thrive and multiply. The Milford car dealer isn't selling Hondas on the edge of the wilderness. He's on the old Boston Post Road, U.S. 1 -- the road that for the northeast states epitomizes strip development. Empty McDonald's bags are what we are used to seeing in its median and gutters.
"All of a sudden," said Milford's recreation director, "you are seeing dead deer on the Boston Post Road."
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atreyger Posted 1:54 pm
29 Jan 2006
Another interesting thing that I recently overheard from a deer researcher is that they are moving closer to human habitation throughout the Adirondacks, which are not known to be sprawled or overpopulated. So maybe similar activity is going on in Connecticut, where the higher perception of deer in their locality is what is responsible for this sudden boom.
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Tim Abbott Posted 3:50 am
30 Jan 2006
The Adirondacks, which contain vast tracts of relatively intact, maturing forest, offer less food opportunities to deer than adjacent cleared and settled lands. Thus deer will tend to congregate where the resources are, and rapidly expand their numbers there.
Other forest-dwelling species will do the same thing when presented with the buffet of food choices presented by residential areas. I am aware of large forested areas in the Northeast where resident black bears left the interior and headed down to the settled lands during periods of drought and food shortage, and then never made the trip back up the mountain.
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