Deer herds could devastate Oakland County's landscape

Over the past six months, I have watched with great interest the events that have unraveled in Rochester Hills, home of more than 1,000 deer as of last fall according to their naturalist. In November, the community got permission to cull 200 deer from that herd using sharpshooters from the Oakland County Sheriff's Office.

In February, the culling operation was stopped because only 16 deer had been killed and community opposition was growing. So logically, those deeply concerned citizens were calmed down by the creation of a committee -- a deer management committee that will report during the summer with recommendations.

What a mess! After "studying" the problem for over a year, there appears to be no one in Rochester Hills that understands the real problem. The published issue of concern is the number of car accidents created by deer. Car crashes are bad, but that is not what should be keeping the folks in Rochester Hills awake at night. The problem will be the systematic destruction of the ecological health of the community, and the deer will be the masters of that destruction.

Because a happy doe will usually have two babies a year, while the sheriff's folks were trying to kill 200 deer, the number of the herd would still have risen to be more than 1,500 deer -- just in time for the deer management report. No matter what the report says, in 2010 the number of very large furry plant harvesters will be well more over 2,000. Since there will unlikely be any acceptable method for reducing deer numbers in the next five years, there is no reason not to assume that the deer population in this community will exceed 3,500 deer.

Now here is the sobering part. A mature deer will consume five to seven pounds of organic matter every day. They eat only stuff that grows. Last year, those 1,000 deer were chomping more than 5,000 pounds of plants every day.

The reality of this devastation will begin to become very obvious when the population of deer in Rochester Hills exceeds 3,000. Those deer will need to be consuming 15,000 pounds of plant materials each day, and that much food will not be there. By then, the understory of any area of woods will be bare. No new trees will be growing in the woods in Rochester Hills for many decades.

Landscapes around all those lovely homes in this upper-income community will be denuded of all shrubs, flowers and ground covers. When deer are starving, and the deer in Rochester Hills will be starving, they will eat any plant they can find. So forget about that list of landscape plants that deer are supposed to avoid.

By the way, in the next five or six years many other suburban communities in southern Michigan will have the same devastating experience I've predicted for Rochester Hills. I feel sorry for the deer management committees of these communities.

Jeff Ball is a freelance writer living outside Detroit with a Web site at http://www.yardener.com">www.yardener.com and the e-mail address jeffball@starband.net">jeffball@starband.net.