Oh Deer! NJ Seeks Ways to Rein in Surging Deer Population

Even as Ryck Suydam stood in the middle of his retail greenhouse on the 300-acre Suydam Farms in Somerset County, he suspected the deer that frolic in the nearby Six Mile Run Reservoir were nibbling away at his crops.

Portions of the state park are protected from hunting so, according to Suydam, the deer "know" they’re safe. That's because whitetail deer have a knack for memorizing human behavior patterns, and are particularly bold at night.

“They know Ryck goes to bed about 9:30 p.m., and they’ll come over and start going after the pumpkins and the squash and then they’re out in the Christmas trees,” Suydam said. “They destroy the Christmas trees to the point where even Charlie Brown doesn’t want ‘em.”

Suydam is the president of the New Jersey Farm Bureau – a Trenton-based non-profit that represents 10,000 farmers across the state. Suydam said the surging deer population is costing the state's farmers a lot of green, like the $8 million they eat out of soybean growers' profits every year.

Suydam refers to the deer as both, “majestic” and as a "gang" that, at night, go out and “terrorize the neighborhood.” The conflicting descriptions capture the complicated relationship between New Jersey residents who settle in the suburbs for open skies and nature, and the deer population that has grown beyond what they care to tolerate.

“We’re out of balance ecologically,” said Suydam. “It's not healthy for the ecology…. It's not healthy for the economy, and it's not healthy for people living in New Jersey.

Suydam, through the Farm Bureau, is spearheading a coalition that includes farmers, environmental groups, and local park operators, that are trying to grapple with a deer population they say has gotten out of control.

The coalition's goal is to come up with a list of measures for reducing the deer population to present to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. The Division of Fish and Wildlife, a section of the NJDEP, manages the state's deer population, primarily through hunting.

Suydam said the problems deer pose to New Jerseyans go beyond putting a crimp in farmers' profits, and eating individual homeowners' gardens. Deer also carry ticks, which spread Lyme disease. And conservation groups say they’re eating away the forest understory, which threatens to destroy the habitat of other wildlife.

Kelly Mooij with the New Jersey Audubon Society called the shrinking understory a “significant ecological concern."

“If you can see through underneath all of the trees it means it's not a really healthy forest,” Mooij told state lawmakers in Trenton last year during a hearing on the deer population. “All of the understory has been decimated largely by these overabundant deer populations.”

But for many New Jersey residents, the deer population boom is experienced most vividly behind the wheel.

That's because State Farm Insurance reports there were nearly 27,000 deer-vehicle collisions last year - and those are the ones that were reported. Some drivers don’t report the wrecks because they don’t want their premiums to go up.

Carole Stanko, who's chief of the Bureau of Wildlife Management at NJDEP, said the vast imbalance of deer in New Jersey is due to multiple factors, including the absence of a natural predator for the animal, since wolves and mountain lions no longer populate much of the state. There's also the easy access to food that human habitation brings, and a decline in hunting.

There are 3,000 less hunters in New Jersey this year compared to a decade ago. DEP officials attribute the steady decline to a lack of interest from younger residents.

But Stanko said a key issue is that hunters don’t have access to deer because most of the land in the state where the animal lives is privately owned (like suburban subdivisions), and that deer densities are lower in places where hunting is actually permitted.

She said hunters could have a bigger impact if private owners would open up their property to them.

And for residents concerned about the use of guns in the middle of a populated area, Stanko said there are other options. “You can use archery which is just as efficient and quiet,” Stanko said.

She said she has worked with municipalities like Princeton, where officials authorized 3 bow hunters to kill deer in town after they began to proliferate in the Riverside Neighborhood.

But animal rights groups and many nature lovers oppose the killing of deer simply to accommodate complaints from annoyed residents.

Doris Lin is an attorney with the League of Humane Voters of New Jersey, a group that opposes killing deer as a method of population management. At a hearing in Trenton last year, she told legislators the state should be focused on reducing deer-human conflicts - like using road signs to get cars to slow down on roads that cut through deer habitats.

Lin said that rather than using hunting to cull herds, ovariectomies on female deer are preferred by her group, though she said the cost of spaying one animal costs between $1,000 and $1,200. Legislators were not receptive to that idea, saying it didn’t seem practical to perform the surgery on so many deer. 

In the meantime, state legislators introduced a bill last year that would ban the feeding of deer and allow the hunting of the animal on private forestland. For now, that measure appears to be stalled.