By Frank Miniter, Executive Field Editor
Standing in a tree for hours on end leads to musing.
On a particularly pleasant autumn afternoon hypocrisy was the topic,
because a deer highway passed under my stand with so much whitetail
traffic during the evening rush it had three lanes. The deer thoroughfares
led over an ancient stone wall and into an apple orchard behind
me, but it was where the trails came from that screamed hypocrisy.
The trail wound west through
meadow grass and down an oak ridge to whitetail bedding areas
safely situated between trophy homes surrounded by “no
trespassing” signs. I knew the homes were packed with
metropolitan New Yorkers who mostly don’t approve of
hunting, because when I asked for permission to hunt they
sneered, “We protect the deer on our property.” Yet
these same people gleefully flocked to local farm stands in
late summer and fall to buy this farmer’s fruit.
This land gives deer a sanctuary so at night they can raid local farms, run in front of autos, spread
tick-born diseases and browse away my
neighbor’s petunias.
I’d also done just what a New York biologist recommended. He’d come to do a herd estimate the winter before and said the local deer population had to be reduced, as they were doing more than eating apples, they were over-browsing their own forest and thereby causing an ecological disaster in their woodlot safe havens. So much so that natural fauna, such as grouse, rabbits, and even some songbirds, were disappearing.
The farmer was skeptical. Oh, he knew his apples, pears and peaches were hit hard, and worse, that in winter the starving deer destroyed his young trees, but he let on every hunter who asked and most of them didn’t see a thing after opening day of the firearm season. The biologist shrugged when told this and pointed off the hill where the apples grew to a power line right-of-way running down and through small woodlots in the valley between houses: “That’s where the deer go when you pressure them. And most of that land is closed to hunting, even bowhunting.”
The farmer furled his brow—that he didn’t know.
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