Welcome to DeerFacts.org



NOTE: This article was submitted, in slightly different wording, as a Letter to the Editor to the Newtown Bee in time for the issue of January 2, 2009, after a month of Letters to the Editor from other writers that made wildly distorted and false claims about the position I have taken before the Legislative Council, Board of Selectmen and Conservation Commission. This article was far too long to be published in that space in the Bee, but can be given any space necessary here.

This website will soon contain the products of my months of intensive research into the tick-borne disease and deer overpopulation problems, for all to share. I sincerely intend this for the benefit of our beloved Town of Newtown, and for the greater good of all the creatures in it.

David A. Shugarts
19 Wendover Road

Member, Newtown Lyme Disease Task Force
Newtown Liaison, Fairfield County Municipal Deer Management Alliance
(david.shugarts @ deerfacts.org)

My Position on Tick-Borne Disease and Deer

Many people have attacked my position without really knowing my position, so I am going to take the time and space here to explain it.

A survey last year revealed that 48 percent of Newtown households have had at least one family member treated for Lyme disease.

If you take the 2000 Census figure of 8,325 households (and accept that Newtown has grown since then), you realize that at least 4,000 people in Newtown have had Lyme disease. It could be much higher, if you consider that many members of a given family may have been stricken.

This past year‘s testing of deer ticks at the Newtown Middle School and Al’s Trail revealed that 70 percent were infected with Lyme bacteria.

There are other emerging diseases carried by the tick, such as babesiosis and ehrlichiosis. All these diseases can be fatal. A single bite from a deer tick can give you one, two or more diseases.

Lyme disease isn’t retreating. The latest figures available (2006-2007) from the Centers for Disease Control state that it has increased in Connecticut by 71 percent in that period, and in the U.S. by 38 percent. It is the fastest-growing vector-borne disease in our country. It has now reached all 50 states.

When I learned these facts, and more, I realized that I cannot, in good conscience, remain silent while people in Newtown are getting sick and suffering. With some alarm, I also realized that when we send our Boy Scouts out into the woods, they had better be more prepared for this tick-borne disease hazard, in the same way that they strive to be prepared for every other challenge.

Some of the people stricken with Lyme are “lucky” in the sense that they see a telltale bullseye rash, get an accurate diagnosis and get prompt treatment. That’s because in its early stages, Lyme can be promptly cured. However, since not everyone gets the rash, and particularly since the symptoms don’t always lead to an easy and correct diagnosis, the disease can get much, much worse.

When it does, it is so much harder to cure that it may take months or years of intravenous antibiotics. (As you might almost expect with our health care system nowadays, the health insurers have found a way to say that they don’t have to pay for the long-term treatments that can cost up to $75,000.) So some Newtowners can say, “I had Lyme and it’s no big deal,” but then others can tell you, it’s a really big deal -- life-threatening and life-changing. Consider that children in Newtown have had to attend school with PICC-lines (intravenous catheters) in their chests, or have missed whole school years and have been ostracized by their classmates.

There is a powerful documentary film, “Under Our Skin,” being shown in area towns, that portrays the acute suffering of these people. It will be shown January 24 at the New Milford Public Library, February 7 at the Booth Library here in Newtown, and February 8 at the Jewish Community Center in Sherman. All showings will be at 1 p.m. People from Newtown appear in this film.

It was disturbing enough to learn about the unchecked rise of tick-borne disease. Then I learned about the two-year life cycle of the deer tick (also called the black-legged tick).

It’s true and well-known that the Lyme disease bacterium is hosted by mice, shrews, voles, etc. in the first year of the deer tick’s life cycle. (So there is no need to keep making that seem to be a revelation.)

There are those who would say that we can just treat all these little creatures with tickicides and it will fix the problem. Is that idea practical? I invite everyone to check it out. I did, and it doesn’t look feasible to me. Nor does it seem feasible to the many towns in this area and elsewhere that have thoroughly studied these issues. (It may make sense in a yard, but not as a technique for protecting a town.)

But then I learned that the second year of the tick’s life involves a crucial link. The adult female deer tick needs a blood meal and a ride on a large mammal, present in sufficient density, so that she can lay the 2,000 to 3,000 eggs that will complete the cycle. If you can break this link, by reducing deer numbers sufficiently, you can dramatically reduce the number of ticks, and reduce the disease sharply. This has already been done in study communities in Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The only mammal we have that suits this description is the whitetailed deer. You might hear that bears or raccoons or coyotes are large enough mammals, but they don’t live here in great enough densities to assist the deer tick appreciably in completing its life cycle.

There is a threshold effect relating this disease with deer density. If it is below approximately 10 deer per square mile, the deer tick numbers drop, and the incidence of Lyme disease is hugely curtailed. (This does not happen in a single year, of course, since the tick’s life cycle is two years. And it does not happen if your efforts to reduce deer population have not yet achieved a value close to 10 deer per square mile and is maintained at that density.)

Unfortunately, according to the DEP, deer densities throughout Fairfield County are about 40-60 per square mile, and there are pockets of 80.

This is really striking when you learn that the whitetail was all but totally gone from this state, and the entire Northeast, in 1900. It was still a very rare thing to even see a deer in town in 1975. So all of the deer overpopulation that we now have, has been because we did not attend to the problem within the last 30 years.

So far I have only been speaking here about deer and the link to tick-borne disease, which is the number one reason why we must reduce the deer density. But I have consistently mentioned four other reasons.

My second reason is, the number of deer-vehicle accidents is unacceptably high. There are now about 1.5 million of these DVAs a year in the U.S., costing about $1.1 billion in damages, but also, resulting in 29,000 cases of human injury and about 200 human fatalities. I never forget the deer: in the majority of these accidents, a deer died—if you want to talk about a slaughter, this is tragic. Moreover, you can only get estimates, not accurate counts, of how many DVAs are not reported. It is all too common that the deer dies in one of those—sometimes getting crippled and dying in agony.

In any given state or town, the only two significant “predators” for deer now are the hunter and the car. The car at times is the bigger (and certainly less humane) killer. As you drive on the roads of Newtown, you are a deputized deer hunter, whether you volunteered for the job or not.

Third, the deer are doing very large amounts of damage to our plants, vegetables and flowers. When a typical small town takes a count of the yard damage, it can run into the millions of dollars a year. And let us not forget the farms and nurseries in Newtown. But I would consider this point a mere economic annoyance, if it were not for the fact that the deer are transporting infected ticks to our doorsteps. One deer can transport hundreds of ticks.

Fourth, the deer are destroying our forests. They do this by merely trying to exist and multiply, of course, so I am not “blaming” the deer. But they have no way of curbing their urge to browse the foliage. This completely changes the woodlands because they remove the tree seedlings and saplings that would regenerate the trees above. In other words, when the tall trees die, so will the forest.

Killing this understory also means that the other creatures of the forest lose their habitat, and so we are losing the diversity of the native plants, along with endangered species of songbirds. Many little creatures are forced out of their former habitats. What the deer do not prefer to eat are the invasive plants, such as barberry, so that you can find stands of trees where nothing but an invasive plant is growing on the forest floor. When this forest destruction gets severe enough, it can alter the run-off characteristics of the woodlands, threatening aquifers and contributing to the frequency and severity of flooding.

Fifth, I do not forget the deer themselves. The situation creates suffering deer. When they overpopulate, they eat the forest understory and our yard plants but some people have a bit of success in planting a few non-preferred shrubs. But when the winter gets deep and cold, the deer eat those non-preferred plants, too. Then they eat bark off the trees. We have typically had some mild winters for a while, but a severe one is always part of the law of averages, even despite global warming. In a severe winter, the deer “yard up” underneath the pines and hemlocks, eventually being unable to get out to forage, and there they die with pine needles in their bellies (or even dirt, I am told). They die out of sight of man, so that most of us will never see the true outcome of our deer-neglecting policies.

When I had learned all this, I wondered whether anyone was doing anything about it. Well, that led to some revelations.

First, there isn’t any level at which we are getting the kind of attention to the problem that we deserve. We live in Connecticut, the “ground zero” of the Lyme epidemic that was identified over 30 years ago, and yet we have no coherent policies to take action against the disease. We have had tens of thousands of sick people, many of whom travel out of state because they cannot get informed physicians that can treat them here. We have not one facility, in any hospital, that specializes in the treatment of tick-borne diseases.

Locally, in Newtown, we have had nothing but lip service and foot-dragging for the past decade. You can rely on our officials in town to warn you not to get bitten by a tick. If you were looking for them to do anything effective, well, that would take some courage.

Doing something involves deer management. This can come in many forms and everyone who studies this topic will naturally look at all possible alternatives. I certainly did. There are measures such as deer repellants, deer-resistant plantings, deer fences, that will suffice for some homeowners (usually until the deer get really hungry). There are various forms of deer contraceptives, a well-known device to paint the deer’s ears with tickicide, and a number of other notions. When all of these are studied alongside the option of directly reducing the deer population, the practical and effective answer is to reduce the herd.

Personally, I didn’t start out in my research by aiming to kill deer and I do wish the alternatives were more effective. But as I began to collect huge amounts of information on the issues, including the reports of many, many towns such as Greenwich, Ridgefield, Darien, Brookfield, etc., it invariably has occurred that reasonable people do their committee work, study all the alternatives, and select controlled hunting as the practical answer. It is a difficult decision and never likely to gain 100 percent agreement in any town. I have found that communities such as Bryn Gweled and Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, founded on Quaker principles, have agonized over the choices and yet have settled on reducing the herd.

The method is known as controlled hunting. No one writing in The Bee (including its reporters, but certainly all the anti-hunting writers) has taken any pains to distinguish controlled hunting from recreational, or sport hunting.

In controlled hunting, an attempt is made to harvest deer by the most efficient and humane means possible, whether it be sharpshooting on large parcels of land, or bowhunting on smaller parcels. All shooting is done from tree stands, so that arrows or bullets cannot travel far. Bait is used. Signs are posted, and hunt dates and times are published. The hunters very carefully set up near deer trails (not people trails) for two reasons: to avoid shooting near people, and to be where the deer are. There is no chance at all of a hunter mistaking a person or a pet for a deer, since the hunter waits for the deer to get into position over the bait, at very close range. The hunters are trained, certified and insured.

Whereas there are commercial companies that will remove deer expensively, we also have available locally, volunteers who are ready do the work for free. The only significant cost involved is butchering the deer, but the good news is that the venison (a very healthy meat) is donated to feed the needy. In this winter of terrible economic travails, that may be some comfort to many people.

Since controlled hunting hasn’t even been discussed by a yet-to-be-formed committee in Newtown, no controlled hunting has taken place here. All of the “horror stories” appearing in the Bee (true or false) so far this year have involved some form of sport hunting.

This issue has been posed by some as “hunting on town land.” Whether “sport hunting on town land” is allowed or not, or on any given parcel, is not an issue we should worry about, because most of those decisions about sport hunting really rest with the state Department of Environmental Protection.

It has been stated at meetings and perhaps in letters that I am a hunter. This isn’t true, and it is just one small example of people jumping to totally unsubstantiated conclusions.

The only other thing that I have to say about sport hunting is that I expect it to be done by safe and responsible licensed hunters; I do not condone any form of reckless hunting or illegal hunting.

On the other hand, if we ever begin controlled hunting in Newtown, it will have to be a town-wide effort in order to be effective. That means that controlled hunts should be conducted wherever the deer are overpopulated, on town land, private lands, land trust lands, utility company lands.

Further, the opponents of controlled hunting make it appear that we might be talking about a single hunt, but in fact, it will take some years to reduce the herd, and it will take continuous annual efforts to maintain the herd at an appropriate density. The good news is that the maintenance hunts would involve only a modest number of deer.

As always, there is one fact to be stressed: even if we didn’t have a tick-borne disease problem, we would still have a deer problem.

It should be remembered that the State of Connecticut has all of the issues covered in one small booklet, available online as well as in hard copy, called “Managing Urban Deer in Connecticut.” You can find it here:
http://www.ct.gov/dph/lib/dph/urbandeer07.pdf and also here:
http://www.ct.gov/dep/lib/dep/wildlife/pdf_files/game/urbandeer07.pdf.

“Managing Urban Deer” covers all of the major deer management options but controlled hunting is seen as the practical and effective choice (by the State of Connecticut). In Fairfield County alone, controlled hunting programs have been initiated in Greenwich, Darien, New Canaan, Wilton, Redding, Ridgefield, Weston and Brookfield (at varying levels of activity). This only represents the tip of an iceberg, and I could cite at least 20 other towns elsewhere. The actual number may be in the hundreds or more.

With only slight variations, towns all over the eastern U.S. all seem to come to the conclusion that the practical and effective choice, after thoroughly studying all the alternatives (and not without contentiousness), is controlled hunting.

The National Park Service uses controlled hunting, as does the USDA’s Wildlife Service, the Nature Conservancy, the Audubon Society. Here in Connecticut, the DEP’s personnel have actually conducted controlled hunting on certain occasions. Thus, controlled hunting is widely practiced, orthodox procedure.

This fall, the Fairfield County Municipal Deer Management Alliance hosted a program, “Case Studies in Community-Based Deer Population Control.” A video recording of that event will appear on Charter Channel 21 on January 5 and 12 at 9 p.m., and January 8 and 15 at 3:30 p.m. The very successful deer program at Mumford Cove in Groton, CT will be described, along with updated data on Lyme disease there. At Mumford, deer density has been reduced to the threshold value of about 10 per square mile, and the Lyme incidence has dropped from about 30 cases a year, to 2.

It has never been my intention to decide for the town what should be done. It will take a committee to gather all the data and evidence, and I have urged the Selectmen to make it a committee that fairly represents ALL of Newtown. I have urged completely open committee meetings, hearings, and public forums where experts can speak. Then it probably will take a Town Meeting or even a Referendum to decide how to act on the evidence. What I have said is, the work of many, many other communities is already available publicly, so that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

As a demonstration of that simple fact, here are links to four good examples of town deer committee reports, from Ridgefield and Greenwich, Connecticut, and from the Pennsylvania towns of Lower Makefield and Swarthmore (Crum Woods).

These four reports have been shown, e-mailed and/or physically presented to the Newtown Legislative Council, the Newtown Board of Selectmen, the Newtown Conservation Commission, and the Newtown Bee.

There are many more reports that could be added, and they are all remarkably similar. I will try to get them on on-line here for everyone to see.

We are in for a contentious period in Newtown. But to do nothing is to accept a bad situation that can only get worse. That’s why I called loudly and urgently for action: there hasn’t been any, for many years. For instance, if Newtown is suffering at 48 percent Lyme infection, consider what it might be like at 70 percent, as some towns experienced before they took action.

My call for action is not even new. The Newtown Bee itself published an editorial three years ago advocating a serious look at deer herd reduction in clear and clarion terms: “When a Herd Becomes a Horde.” The shame of it is, nothing has been done to make the situation any better in those three years.

Further, the Newtown Forest Association has recognized that the deer are simply destroying the woodlands that are under the association’s stewardship. In a statement presented to the Board of Selectmen, the association publicly stated that it does not allow hunting on its lands and cannot at this time support a controlled hunting program, but its president went on to give a clear description of the ecological damage being caused by deer. [Click here for the NFA statement.] As it stands, the NFA recognizes the grim truth that its forests may disappear if nothing is done.

Whatever finally happens will definitely not be up to me to decide; it’s going to take all Newtowners, working together, to effect this change. Tick-borne disease isn’t going to go away by itself, nor will the deer.

David A. Shugarts, MS
19 Wendover Road

Member, Newtown Lyme Disease Task Force
Newtown Liaison, Fairfield County Municipal Deer Management Alliance