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Friday, Dec. 15, 2023
It’s full deer hunting season from now until early January in central Virginia and, on first glance, everything appears to be going normally. The Virginia Department of Wildlife Management distributed licenses, which permit hunters to take a certain number of deer, and companies that process deer meat are at near capacity. In fact, Hidden Pines Meat Processing in Madison County is so busy, it begged its customers to have patience in a Facebook post earlier this month.
“We are working through several hundred deer each week,” the company wrote. “We appreciate your patience!”
This seems to signal a robust hunting season — but data from state agencies and private organizations show that it’s anything but. Hunting in Virginia (and all over the country) has steadily and dramatically declined for the past decade or so. This article in Cardinal News delves into why.
From the 1970s through the 1990s, the number of licensed deer hunters in Virginia was high and steady, hovering around 300,000. Then it started to fall — quickly. In 2021, the most recent year that data is available, there were just 185,000 licensed hunters, according to Cardinal News.
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There are other measures that show the hunting dropoff. Hunters for the Hungry donates venison to food banks and pantries across the state. (Around Charlottesville, those donations go to the food pantry Loaves and Fishes, and every year clients eagerly await its arrival, Jane Colony Mills, the pantry’s executive director, told Charlottesville Tomorrow.) But the amount of meat the group distributes is in decline. It peaked in 2010, and has since fallen by more than half.
Besides humans — and their cars — adult deer have little in the way of natural predators. Fawns are sometimes killed by coyotes or bobcats. A few hundred years ago, before Europeans arrived in North America, wolves and mountain lions hunted white tailed deer. But, beginning in the 1800s, white settlers hunted wolves and large cats to extinction on the East Coast and most of the rest of the country. (There’s some recent evidence the mountain lions might be slowly returning to the Blue Ridge, which you can read about in a 2016 report in Blue Ridge Outdoors.)
During that same time period, settlers also nearly wiped out the deer population. The Cardinal News report describes deer’s rise and fall in the United States. Conservationists have since worked hard to reestablish deer herds in this part of the country — but not their predators.
So what does all this mean?
Humans are deer’s last major predator — so with less hunting, the deer population is exploding. And that’s not a good thing. More deer means more collisions with vehicles. Large deer populations also mean large tick populations, as deer are an important source of blood for ticks. More ticks means more lyme disease. Conservationists worry about deer’s effect on plant life, and other animals that need the plants that the deer eat. The Piedmont Environmental Council wrote about all these issues a decade ago.
Since then, one more issue has arisen from the overpopulation of deer: disease. In North America, a fatal neurological illness called chronic wasting disease has emerged among deer. Chronic wasting disease, a fatal neurological disease of deer, elk, and moose that is very similar to Mad Cow Disease, was first reported in Virginia in 2009, and has since spread through multiple counties. As deer populations grow, they live more closely together, which makes it easier to transmit the disease through saliva and bodily fluids.
At this point, there have been no reported cases of people becoming infected with chronic wasting disease but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still warns people not to eat meat of a sick animal. Some studies showed that monkeys became sick after eating infected meat.
“These studies raise concerns that there may also be a risk to people,” according to the CDC.
No one really has a handle on how to manage the deer herd without hunters.
In Charlottesville, like many other cities in Virginia, officials are trying to manage their local deer population through urban archery programs. Every year around February, the city invites archery hunters into its parks at night to remove deer. The meat is processed and donated to Loaves and Fishes.
The event removes around 100 deer annually, though how much of an impact that has on the overall population in the area is unclear.
If you are or know any of the urban archery hunters who will hit the parks in February, we’re interested in talking to you! Hit reply to this email, or send us a message here with a good way to contact you.
I hope you all have a great weekend, and if you’re one of our dwindling central Virginian deer hunters, good luck!
Jessie Higgins, managing editor
P.S. Folks on our team will be at Market Central at Ix Art Park tomorrow! Come say hello!
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