You're all invited to visit the beautiful sunny Isle of Wight where we
have neither grey squirrels nor deer, and natural regeneration of oak
woodland and/or coppice is a joy to behold. You don't realise just what
a price we pay for these two types of tree predators until you see what
it's like without!
Matthew
-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Cullen [mailto:dscottcul@xxxx.net]
Sent: 22 December 2005 12:00
To: UK Tree Care
Subject: Re: Deer protection
Bill, it really becomes a matter of... demographics I suppose.
At some level of animal poulation they are cute, a rare sight to be
treasured. Adam tells us FC consider squirrels to be of more amenity
value than the trees! But at some level they become pests. And not
just in a spoiled and sel-serving human context. Here in NE US the
population is reckoned to be as much as 10x 1900 levels. At the same
time human population has grown and urbanized enormously.
We have created the preferred edge habitat. Tens of thousands of square
miles of "protected" woodlands in the form of watersheds, highway
verges, parks, greenbelts, suburban housing tracts ad infinitum.
Interspersed with similar areas of golf coures, suburban lawns, remnant
pasture ad infinitum with guess what? That deer salad bar of suburban
shrubbery.
And add in the mix the virtually extinct population of hunters and
predators (though coyotes are coming back, breeding with domestic
canines and producing coy-dogs some places I'm told, and in the rural
fringes some reports of large native cats) and there you have it.
Billions in $US losses from deer-auto collissions. Substantial losses
to commercial crops and suburban gardens. And perhpas most expensive of
all deer are one of the hosts of the disease vectoring deer tick. Lyme
disease - a nasty spirochete - is epidemic in humans and dogs.
So while I'm not a hunter myself, there os real logic to hunting as a
population supression measure. I suppose the fox hunting crowd would be
perfectly happy with dogs running deer to ground and tearing them apart.
A bit grizzly for the public footpath users. But I imagine there are
breeds that will just bark at them and scare them away. The Goldens and
Labs would probably want to play with them but the deer won't quite get
it. Border Collies are much more vigilant I reckon.
SC
----- Original Message -----
From: Andersonarb@xxxx.com
To: UK Tree Care
Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2005 3:49 AM
Subject: Re: Deer protection
I'm a bit ambivalent about the hunting subject.... I'm not sure I
would go so
far as to get a dog but if they were my trees ....?
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