Call for More Hunting

East Hampton Town’s deer management advisory committee has recommended increased deer hunting on town lands here in order to thin the deer herd, but wildlife advocates are questioning the effects of deer on the environment and asking for better data.

The committee has recommended allowing experienced hunters access to town properties where hunting is otherwise not permitted and where signs of environmental damage caused by deer are evident. Among the properties selected are the 11-acre Brooks-Park preserve on Neck Path in Springs and a 14-acre former brush dump between Cedar Street and Bull Path in East Hampton.

The recommendations were presented at a town board meeting on Tuesday at which the board listened to differing points of view without comment. Among the speakers was Carol Buda, a member of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife as well as the town’s deer management group, who claimed, “There’s no exploding deer-population crisis.” Rather than reducing the herd, a better focus of the town’s efforts, she said, would be to address the incidence of ­Lyme disease, which is carried by ticks for which deer and other mammals are hosts.

The “vast amount” of people in East Hampton “doesn’t hunt,” she said. “The community would be better served to have more town land available for recreation, not less.” By expanding the hunting season on town lands, another speaker said, “You are effectively barring the entire nonhunting population from those woodlands. You have to consider the 95 percent of us who do not hunt.”

Marguerite Wolffsohn, the town’s planning director, however, told the town board that reducing the herd would help sustain biodiversity on town lands where the impact of over-browsing is apparent and far-reaching. “The best thing we can do here at this point is to increase the hunting pressure wherever we can. We feel this is a safe way to do that,” she said of the managed hunting plan.

  What is occurring is the “simplification of our natural woodlands,” she said, with a forest layer being eliminated by munching deer. “That layer is the sapling trees — the next generation of trees,” Ms. Wolffsohn said. When you lose the layer of vegetation “you lose the insects, you lose the birds that depend on them. You simplify the whole system, which we are trying to protect.” Ms. Wolffsohn noted that the town has a vegetation protection ordinance to prevent landowners from doing too much clearing, but “we’ve basically had the deer doing what we’ve prohibited homeowners to do.” People “are the only predators left” on the East End for deer, Ms. Wolffsohn said.

Zachary Cohen, the chairman of the deer management committee, described the changes in the ecosystem he has observed on Jacob’s Farm, a town-owned woodland in Springs. Forest has given way to grassland, he said, leading to an increase in raptors and fewer songbirds. “The town board at some point is going to have to make a decision about whether to control or stop or deal with these changing landscapes,” he said.

Bill Crain, the former president of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife,  called for the town to collect information. The town does not “have complete data about what the size of our deer population is,” he said. “That’s not the right way to do things. You don’t reduce something when you don’t know the baseline.” He also said more investigation was warranted to ascertain the effect of deer on the forest understory.

The group’s new president is Dell Cullum, an East Hampton activist and wildlife photographer.

Andy Gaites, who is on the staff of the town’s Land Management Department, agreed that scientific data was key since “we’ve already found that we can’t get an accurate count of deer.” Instead, he said, the town was looking at the “hard numbers” of deer taken by hunters in town each year, and the number of deer carcasses collected along the roads. Last year, town staff pinpointed “vegetation monitoring blocks,” sites where comparisons will be made from year to year of the natural growth and to what extent it has changed. “There’s a real impact of deer going on here,” Mr. Gaites said. “These are the ways we can really measure; it’s not by doing a count.”

In the last several months, Mr. Gaites created a map showing the number of carcasses picked up at various places in town over the last seven years, though it excludes roadways in the incorporated villages and county and state roads, such as Route 114 and the Montauk Highway. With 1,955 points on the map, “this does give you a real sense of the problem of deer-vehicle collisions,” Mr. Gaites told the board.

The deer management committee recommended areas where hunting should be increased based on those findings, and suggested the installation of a warning sign near the town line in Wainscott, alerting motorists to “watch for pedestrians, bicyclists, and deer on the roads.” Road signs could also be placed on other roads, the group says, noting how many deer were killed by vehicles  there during a set time. As speed is presumed to be a factor in many deer-vehicle accidents, speed limits should be enforced, the committee said.

Mr. Crain echoed complaints made by several speakers at recent town board meetings about the makeup of the deer management committee, however, calling the majority “extremely biased in terms of lethal hunting.” Several members who differ with the conclusions told the board recently that the rest of the group and the chair, Mr. Cohen, disregarded their opinions.

“These are living, sentient beings who want to live as much as we want to live,” Mr. Crain said. “I urge you to do a much more thorough scientific investigation before we kill more living sentient beings. It’s just outrageous.”