Courtesy of Colin Purrington

The college will not act on its proposal to cull the Crum deer with sharpshooters until the Pennsylvania Game Commission grants approval.

BY JONATHAN EMONT

In print | Published December 4, 2008 — Updated December 05, 2008 09:36

The deer cull originally scheduled for winter break is likely to be postponed, as the administration waits for approval from the Pennsylvania Game Commission. The administration applied for a permit to hire sharpshooters in mid-November but has not yet heard whether their permit request will be granted. According to Barry Bessler, Chief of Staff of the Fairmount Park Commission, permits from the PGC typically take 30-60 days to process. Jeff Jabco, Co-Chair of the Crum Woods Stewardship Committee, said, “We thought we’d be farther along at this point. We got approval from the township and borough, but it [the cull] may not happen this year. We just don’t know yet.”

It is unclear whether the deer cull will proceed at a later date. The administration has determined that hiring sharpshooters is the most effective way to lower the deer population and the PGC has approved similar measures in the Philadelphia Fairmount Park System. However, Bessler said, “They let us do it because we’re the largest municipality in the commonwealth … No other municipality in the state has gotten permission to conduct a cull with sharpshooters.” As Chief of Staff of the Fairmount Park Commission, Bessler has worked with the PGC, although he has no affiliation with the organization.

This information casts doubt on whether the deer cull, seen by many students as inevitable, will be conducted by sharpshooters as the administration has planned. Jabco said that he was waiting on the PGC response. “It’s hard to say whether it will be approved. We really have no experience with this,” he said. Asked what the CWSC plans to do if it does not receive a permit, Jabco said, “We don’t have a contingency plan. The one other option is to do nothing and that’s what we’ve been doing.”

Doing nothing, according to the CWSC, is not a feasible long-term solution. The CWSC commissioned a report by the Natural Lands Trust and Continental Conservation that concluded that deer overpopulation was a severe threat to the health of the Woods.

In a letter e-mailed to The Phoenix, Jabco and Colin Purrington, professor of biology and Co-Chair of the CWSC, wrote, “Excessive deer browsing is severely limiting the ability of the forest to regenerate naturally and is altering the structure and composition of the forest.” Because the deer primarily consume indigenous plant species, there is concern that without intervention non-native plant species will come to dominate the Woods.

Bessler said that he was unfamiliar with the specific situation of the Crum Woods, but said that, to his understanding, the PGC was designed to “provide opportunities for hunters” and is reluctant to allow the use of sharpshooters. A report issued by the PGC in 2006 concurred, stating: “The Game Commission is directed by law to use hunting as a method of management for white- tailed deer.”
The CWSC, however, is opposed to using recreational hunters to regulate the Crum deer population. The CWSC argued on the Swarthmore Web site that recreational hunting would be ineffective in the Crum and that “the majority of the woods falls within safety zones and would not be huntable without waivers by dozens of adjacent residences.”

In the PGC’s report, entitled “A Plan to Reduce Deer-Human Conflicts in Developed Areas,” the issue of approving sharpshooting is addressed. The report says that in developed areas, “Some non-traditional management approaches may be needed to address the deer problem … Examples of non-traditional management techniques include controlled hunting and sharpshooting.” For such a technique to be authorized, the community is required to write a deer management plan and submit it to the PGC. Such a plan was submitted by the CWSC to the PGC in November. According to Jabco, “The info in the report was an estimate of the deer population and the area it [the proposed cull] will take place in.”

Options for lowering the deer population that don’t involve sharpshooting and recreational hunting have been explored by the CWSC. Once it was determined that lowering the deer population was necessary, Swarthmore College hired Bryon P. Shissler, President of Natural Resource Consultants, to determine methods of dealing with the deer problem.

Among the population control strategies that the college eventually rejected were trapping and transferring deer to other locations, reintroducing predators into the Woods, utilizing contraceptive techniques and adopting mitigation techniques which include, among other things, using fencing and repellent. In his report, however, Shissler concluded that hiring sharpshooters was the only realistic solution. He wrote, “Sharpshooting in suburban landscapes has been shown to be an effective localized tool for reducing deer populations” and noted that neither the Food and Drug Administration or the Environmental Protection Administration has approved contraceptive techniques.

According to Bessler, the sharp shooting technique – when utilized responsibly – is a very effective technique for eliminating excess deer in environments like the Crum Woods. When employed in the Fairmount Park System, which was similarly overpopulated by deer, the sharpshooting method “was very successful,” Bessler said.

Although they share a similar ecological problem, Bessler stressed one significant difference between the two cases: The Fairmount Park System spans over 4000 acres, whereas the Crum Woods is only 220 acres. “I hesitate to compare the situation in your park to ours,” Bessler said, noting that the park’s vast acreage had to be taken into account in deciding among a number of potential population control methods. According to Bessler, it would have been impossible to close down the park to accommodate recreational hunting, given its size.

Sharpshooters operate in a much smaller area than recreational hunters, as they use bait to lure deer to their hideouts. Sharpshooters are also more experienced. “The whole idea with going with the sharpshooters,” Jabco said, “is that these people have done it before.”

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