Planting Season or Hunting Season?
We knew when we found piles of deer scat in our small fenced yard that we would have trouble eating food from our garden before the deer did. I saw a family of three deer on the way to the supermarket a while ago. And last week, as I walked home from work, two fully grown does stared me down from the middle of the sidewalk, one block from our house in the middle of Helena.
According to a recent New York Times article (reg. req.), there are 50 times more deer in America–25 to 30 million of them–than there were a century ago:
Across the country, deer cause 1.5 million traffic accidents, $1.1 billion in vehicle damage and 150 deaths a year, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, in Arlington, Va. The highest populations occur where guns are banned.
“Back in the early 1970’s, Princeton banned the discharge of firearms, and deer-car collisions went up 600 percent,” said Susan Martka, a wildlife biologist for New Jersey’s Division of Fish and Wildlife.
Now the gardeners are getting even–they’re hiring sharpshooters and bowhunters to protect their greens. Do they make gardening aprons in blaze orange?