Local Hunting Restrictions Interfere With Deer Management

Auto Accidents and Lyme Disease Are Serious Problems

Dreaded Lyme Disease Jumps In Neighboring Town

The town of Medfield passed an ordinance several years ago prohibiting the discharge of firearms on town property.

As a result, there were fifty vehicle-deer collisions last year in Medfield. Many were on Routes 109 and 27, which are the main roads through town. Route 27 is a high-speed road with a limit of 55 mph, but most cars exceed that.

While many Massachusetts residents are delighted when they spot a deer in a field, the people who live in areas with high deer populations find the animals a problem. In addition, the overpopulation causes serious problems for the deer, either from starvation or auto accidents.

A state wildlife official says that he tries to keep the deer population managed with limits on the number that hunters can shoot, but the local hunting restrictions often conflict with those regulations and create problems. Deer Biologist Bill Woytek from the Mass. Division of Fisheries and Wildlife told MassNews that the only predator in Massachusetts for deer is the automobile versus the hunter.

Higher Number of Accidents

Woytek’s experience shows that the towns in Massachusetts with hunting restrictions more stringent than state law have a higher incidence of deer-auto accidents. “That is 50% speculation,” he said. To get the hard numbers, he is surveying all the police chiefs in Massachusetts for road kill data from the last two years. He hopes to have a final report together by the end of the year.

"If hunters don’t have access or the ability to hunt in an area, the only way to keep the deer population in check is with automobiles."

Woytek said he does have a road-kill database, but the reporting is not what it should be. A driver who hits a deer and wants to legally keep it can bring it to a wildlife office and fill out the paperwork and have it tagged. That paperwork is sent to Woytek so he knows how many deer are actually hit. If the deer is not claimed, the DPW just picks up the animal and Woytek doesn’t know about it.

High-density areas for deer according to Woytek are the eastern part of the state, inside of Rt. 495.

“Nantucket probably has the highest density in the state,” he said. “With Nantucket, it is the logistics of hunters getting out there. Inland, it is more due to restrictions of the towns. You can’t hunt everywhere, granted. But in some areas getting access to the deer is the biggest thing. Towns that restrict access to the deer provide messages to the deer that hunters don’t have access. If hunters don’t have access or the ability to hunt in an area, the only way to keep the deer population in check is with automobiles.”

Woytek’s job is to manage the deer population in the state. In areas where the habitat can support more deer, the state restricts the number that can be harvested in that area.

Deer densities in the western half of the state are about 10-15 per square mile. Densities in the eastern half are 20 or more per square mile.

“In areas such as eastern Massachusetts where the deer population is exceeding what the people will tolerate or the habitat can support, we are very liberal about the number of deer that you can take in a season. Medfield, Medway, Sherborn and Dover are one area where there is still a lot of woods with a habitat for the deer to live in, but there is restriction on the ability of people to hunt in that area. If you restrict the only thing controlling the population, which is hunting, it is going to grow. The higher it grows the more automobile impacts you are going to have in that town,” said Woytek.

“Nantucket came to us 4 years ago because of their deer problem. We increased their bag limit and they doubled their harvest in one year. There were a lot of automobile accidents and Lyme disease incidents. They had one of the highest cases of tick borne diseases in the nation. Lyme disease in people goes along with a high deer population. The deer carries the tick and the bite of the tick results in disease almost like rheumatoid arthritis. More deer, more ticks.”

The Mass. Dept. of Public Health says the number of reported Lyme disease cases has been steadily increasing over the past ten years in Massachusetts. Lyme disease can cause serious long-term musculoskeletal, cardiac, and/or neurologic problems if not recognized and treated early according to the MDH.

‘It’s Terrible’

Medfield homeowner Jeb Patch told Massachusetts News about the problems deer have caused him this past winter.

“It’s terrible, we had them all over the place. One of them was standing and looking in the kitchen window at me. I went out to scare him off and seven of his friends came running up from my front yard.”

Patch, whose property is on Indian Hill Road next to a protected area, said the deer ate between five and ten thousand dollars worth of his shrubbery.

“They ate every bit of it. They ate all my Wilson rhododendrons this winter plus my holly, my new azaleas; they ate the buds right off of everything. Plus, they pooped all over my yard. My neighbor is also frustrated. He is putting in new trees to try to block the little path they keep coming up, but it’s not going to do any good.”

Patch is worried about deer ticks and Lyme disease. He said his new puppy came in covered with ticks. He also said a deer ran into the side of his friend’s car.

“We ought to be shooting them,” he said.

There are some areas of state land in that town that are still open for hunting however, particularly the state hospital. Police Chief Richard Hurley explained to Mass News that Medfield was going through a tremendous boom in population at the time they put in the restriction and people were concerned when they saw hunters walking down the streets with firearms or intruding on private property.

Hurley said he introduced an alternative ordinance at the time, which would have designated certain areas for hunting with a town permit. “That proposal didn’t fly. The other one flew,” he commented.

He says the reason he proposed the alternative bylaw was because of his concern about the deer population. He said he tried to count the number of deer in town from a state police helicopter, but the method was unscientific. He said he only remembers that there were a lot of deer.

Good for Body Shops

Rick Taylor, who owns Rick’s Auto Body in Medfield, told MassNews he repairs about a dozen cars a year damaged by deer. He said he saw 18 deer in a field off Hartford St. in Medfield the day before. There is a conservation area on Hartford Street.

Taylor’s wife, Elaine, said they see deer everywhere at night. They avoid Hartford Street at night with the tow truck because of all the deer in the road. They drive in the middle of the road, she said, if they have to take that route. She said she was driving with her daughter just recently during the day on route 27 when four deer crossed in front of them.

She said the police chief and selectmen in town are approachable and she is confident that they will do something about it.

Medfield Selectman Osler Peterson told MassNews that some people think a lot of deer in town is a great thing, but clearly it is a problem if they are causing vehicle damage. “That’s not good for the deer and not good for the automobiles,” he said. He said he thinks the deer affect various parts of town differently. He said the deer eat a lot of his plants and he can’t keep hostas because the deer seem to like them, but he sees other people in town don’t have a problem keeping hostas. He said he tries to design his plantings around things the deer don’t like.

Peterson said there are a lot of people aware of the deer issue but there hasn’t been any discussion about changing the hunting restrictions, which he said, were passed because of the growth of the town’s population. He said there is a very divergent opinion about how to handle the deer problem in other communities that he’s heard about. “Some people want to hunt, and other people say that it is totally inappropriate to kill the deer. The problem is if they do get overpopulated, they starve to death in addition to becoming a nuisance and a danger for traffic,” he said.

Biologist Woytek told MassNews, “We manage our deer in zones. We have 15 different deer management zones in Massachusetts. They are set up biologically according to how many deer that area can support. Nantucket is its own zone. The Berkshires can be completely different than the Medfield area. We have different densities at which we manage the deer. When towns enact ordinances that supercede our regulations it makes it a lot more difficult for us to do that. It creates a problem. We have established two season-length bag limits in these areas to help keep the level healthy for people and for the deer. We don’t want deer starving. We don’t want too many deer; we don’t want too few deer. Everybody likes to see a deer. Not everybody likes to see a yard full of them at one time.”

The number of reported Lyme disease cases has been steadily increasing over the past ten years in Massachusetts.

Woytek said that the Wilbraham Board of Selectmen contacted him late last year because they were having an increased number of deer-car collisions. The town is located in the suburbs of Springfield. He said the town has pretty severe hunting restrictions. “They actually had more deer killed by automobile than they had harvested in that town by almost double,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Wilbraham Selectmen told MassNews that they had 66 deer-motor vehicle collisions last year. They have three local provisions in their bylaw that are more restrictive of hunting than neighboring towns and state statutes.

After working with Woytek, the town voted in May to amend the provision that banned all hunting on town-owned land. They voted to allow only archery hunting, and only for deer. The bylaw change still has to be approved by the State Attorney General.

Town officials chose the “archery only option” because arrows have a limited range of about 30 yards, are usually aimed downward from a tree stand and make no noise.

When told that Wilbraham loosened their hunting ban after working with wildlife experts, Medfield Selectman Peterson told MassNews, “It certainly sounds like something that the town perhaps should take a look at if there is some way to do it that the people can agree on.”

Dreaded Lyme Disease Jumps In Neighboring Town

August 2001

While the citizens of Medfield forbid the hunting of deer in their town, the neighboring town of Needham has seen the number of people with Lyme disease jump.

It went from two cases per year in 1997-1998 to four in 1999 and fifteen in 2000.

“It’s a significant enough jump that we are concerned,” Fredric Cantor, director of the town’s Board of Health told the Boston Globe. “We want to get the word out that this is something that people should be careful about.”

This disease is carried by small ticks that use deer as their hosts. The large increase in the number of deer and the ticks that accompany them have caused the damage to people’s health.

“It used to be that children could play almost anywhere without fear, but that important pleasure has been pretty much eliminated,” one longtime resident told MassNews.