Deer Wars: Science, Tradition, and the Battle over Managing Whitetails in Pennsylvania

4 Too Many Mouths in the Grocery Aisle

4 too many mouths in the grocery aisle It was almost perfect, really, in a twisted sort of way. We were standing at the edge of a cornfield on Sheldon Brymesser’s farm in Boiling Springs, Cumberland County. The corn was green and lush, row after row of stalks taller than my six foot one. The woods beyond the field, the grass sprouting from the tractor tire–rutted dirt where we had walked, the farmhouse lawn in the distance, all were just as luxuriant . After three hot, dry summers in a row, we had finally gotten some rain, and everything was responding. A light, gentle mist was falling even today, and everything seemed fresh and vibrant. A closer look, however, revealed some troubling signs. Examining individual corn stalks rather than the field as a whole, we saw some that were bent or broken. Everywhere, there were telltale tracks in the dirt. “They’re never going to get any higher than this, they’re never going to get an ear, they’re never even going to be any good as silage,” said Brymesser of the damaged stalks. “The deer take a bite and fold the stock over and that’s the end of the corn. It never grows back. We’ve been lucky, they haven’t really been able to keep up with the corn this year, so we’ll probably get away with losing about 10 percent of our tonnage. Last year, no way. With the drought, things were slow to grow and the deer just killed us.” Even among the stalks still standing tall there was evidence of deer. Brymesser was showing us how many of the ears had been nipped by hungry whitetails. They had moved from stalk to stalk, sampling a little here, a little there. Brymesser, who farms about eleven hundred acres, counting what he owns and leases, was holding one of the rough stalks in his calloused hands when something funny happened. As he was talking, Mike Pechart, now an executive assistant in the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, motioned toward something over Brymesser’s shoulder. We all looked. As if on cue, a white-tailed deer had stepped out of the corn about eighty yards away. She stopped when she saw us, her tail held at half mast and her ears swiveling around to catch any sound. She was too far away for me to see it, but I could imagine her nose twitching, too, as she tried to catch our scent in the air. Behind the doe, still half obscured by the first row of corn, was a fawn. It stopped, following its mom’s lead. Was there a second fawn, we wondered? Maybe even a third? Twins are common and triplets aren’t unheard of in areas of good habitat, and Brymesser’s farm certainly offered that. We never got an answer. After a few more seconds the doe, her body language betraying her impatience with our presence, turned and silently melted away into the corn, taking at least that one fawn with her. “We have two hundred acres of ground here that’s in woods, and if the deer could all stay there, that would be fine with me,” Brymesser said, staring toward the spot that had held two deer just seconds earlier. “But they surely don’t. And there’s been a definite, substantial increase in the number of deer in the immediate area. I’ve seen as many as fifty-two deer at a time in our fields. And that’s at any time of day. Any time you look around out here you can see them. It used to be you’d only see them in the early morning or right at dark. But now it’s all the time. It upsets my wife because she’ll look out to the fields and she’ll see them here all the time.” We were visiting Brymesser’s farm to get a firsthand look at the damage people like Pechart describe when talking about the need to control deer in agricultural areas. The problem is large and very real. Alice Wywialowski, senior wildlife biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture ’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, pointed me to a study released in 2002. It determined that annual crop losses from wildlife totaled $619 million nationwide, with the loss of fruits, nuts, and vegetables costing another $146 million. Deer alone accounted for 58 percent of the field crop losses...