Living at Mile 14 for a 1/4 century and in Soldotna for damn near another 1/4 we're used to critters. We had Caribou entangle their antlers in our fence , we had Moose sleeping under the eve, we had Brown Bears nosing the window wall and of course they got MP's tulips every spring....but the Deer here in Helena are nasty, they're everywhere. And unlike Ham-bone from which we just escaped these deer are big Mule Deer with voracious appetites and a confidence that almost looks like they could charge you.
I tell people that in Alaska they would never have this, there's literally trails in town and not only are they habituated to people they're habituated to my beautifully landscaped yard. Years ago in the Katmai National Park area on an isolated Hagermeister Island the Reindeer heard got out of control and were eating the Island bare and creating huge earthen trails all around the island. Well in Alaska you can't have that so they hired ( coincidently ) some Montana cowboys who were going to round them up and then sell them....well, that worked so good they were on the plane back in 4 days. So in comes the National guard with helicopters and machine guns and problem solved...and that's what we need here !
But the way it works around here is a committee ( ya know the old adage ' if you want to slow something down form a committee' ) is trying to decide the proper deer density in the urban area. They go out at night with spotlights and count the deer and then hope to come up with a number to manage for....yikes, these guys are right out of the Alaska Dept. of fish and Game ( adf+g) playbook. The number being bandied around is 25 per square mile.
Yawn for emphasis. Here's a couple pics I took to illustrate why they gotta go. The first one is the trail through our lush side garden and the second one is...well just what everybody needs is piles of doinkers as Geno used to call them.
So when I finally get my wings here and start to try and help I got good ideas...and they're free. The right number for urban deer population should be zero. Period. None. Notta. And then when whatever program that's designed fails like they all do we end up with maybe 1/2 of which we had before and that's moving forward. I'd relate to these Helena people what the Congressman for all Alaska Don Young so accurately said " you can't just let nature run wild " . And then if I had a minute left in my 3 minute lecture I'd tell them about ADF+G's over escapement theory that was actually created by and sold to them by the commercial fishing industry whose mantra is ' the only good fish is a dead fish '....killed by them of course. It goes like this : to many salmon spawning in a stream will reduce the run because they use up all the habitat and spawn on top of themselves. Then the smolt of these over escaped fish go out to sea and there as so many of them that they eat all the plankton and all the bait and , well it's just a big mess. So there has to be a right number for density and that to many fish is worse than not enough so they should error on the side of $$$ and kill em all. Never mind that common sense will tell you that the fish and the deer have been around a hell of a lot longer than the managers ...ooopp's.....they prefer to be called scientists.
OK, I'll give it to some people that they are kinda cute when they're fawns.. But just like kittens grow into smelly- stinking - crapping in the house cats they quit being cute at some point. So ...idea # 2 part b on page 37 which is highlighted, and it's an easy one. Obviously we can't be shooting off guns or arrows in town so we have Mule deer trapping season....
ahhhh, there's a cute one. In the mean time I'm told by locals that they make deer repellent products that work on their sophisticated olfactory sense . Some of it is smells they don't like and some are smells of things they're afraid of, like human beans. mmmmm....well, hello, there's only about 50,000 people in this town , maybe that ain't enough smell to work.
