wildlife

Four ways you could stop deer culls

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Whitetail deer are gorgeous. There’s no getting around it.

If you hate it that your city or county heartlessly kills deer, even pregnant does, here are the alternatives:

  • Ask your local government to plant a dense forest perimeter around areas of human habitation. Deer stay away from dense forest, and interactions between deer and humans is the main reason for deer culls.
  • Stop planting ornamentals! If you have deer, those cherished tulip bulbs are nothing but deer food. Let your yard go wild with native plants and plant native trees. Ditch the lawn. Suburban lawns are the main reason deer have become a suburban nuisance.
  • Pressure your local government to reintroduce wolves into your neighborhood. There’s a good chance wolves were once native to your area. The decimation of wolves and big cats is the main reason for deer overpopulation.
  • Lobby to protect deer predators at the local and national level. The despised coyote is actually the best defense against deer overpopulation. And coyotes kill way fewer people than deer, if you add up the car fatalities that result from collisions between cars and deer. Other predators that should be cherished are big cats (especially mountain lions and bobcats) and golden eagles. You don’t believe an eagle can kill a deer? Watch it on YouTube.

But I didn’t mean to kill those thousand birds! So that’s okay, then

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Trumps tramples the Migratory Bird Treaty Act

United States President Donald Trump and his regime are attacking one of the most sacred laws protecting wildlife: the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

As you should know, migration is a risky venture. Migratory birds undertake it because they have specific ideas about where to raise their families. If you were born in the crevice of a sheer rock face, you can’t imagine any place else to make a nest.

Migrating to the arctic, incidentally, is one way some bird species are surviving. Birds who raise the next generation in the most hostile habitats have less to fear from humans and their destructive sprawl.

Some birds travel thousands of miles, and their journeys are epic. Bar-headed geese fly in the thin air five miles above the ocean. Hummingbirds, by contrast, clear the Gulf of Mexico, avoiding headwinds by flying dangerously low and risking death by drowning. Only one fourth of newborn hummingbirds will survive the journey.

Despite their bad reputations as squatters, many Canada geese still fly up to three thousand miles to the northernmost parts of North America.

To offer these intrepid travelers some kind of protection seems the least humans can do.

But the Trump regime has now reinterpreted the MBTA to mean that you can be fined only if you meant to kill the birds.

This leaves industries free to destroy birds with oil spills, construction, pesticides, tractors, concrete pours, chainsaws, and deforestation. At greatest risk appear to be ground nesters and waterfowl.

The whole point of the MBTA was to make businesses think before clear cutting or being careless with their emissions.

Of course it’s their fault if their actions kill birds. Every business and individual has the duty to anticipate unintended consequences and prevent them.

This unfortunate new interpretation of the decades-old protection means that many species of birds will head towards extinction on an accelerated basis.

What you can do

Please use this form to contact your local law makers and express concern about the disembowelment of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.