Conservation agent proposes bowhunting in Cape city limits

To learn more about archery hunting in Missouri go to the Missouri Department of Conservation Web site.

Deer are fair game in Columbia, Mo.

At least they are for bowhunters in the fall. In 2004, Columbia opened up four city-owned areas to bowhunters stalking deer. One hunting spot is a section of the Twin Lakes Recreation Area, a 64-acre park where people also can walk and cycle on trails, walk their dogs, fish and swim. Private landowners in the city have been allowed to permit bowhunting on their property during the season since the early 1990s.

Columbia is among a number of urban municipalities around the state attempting to control their deer population by allowing bowhunting within the city limits. Discussions in Cape Girardeau have just begun that could add the city to the list.

Collisions with vehicles and damage to crops, gardens and landscaping are the primary reasons communities want to keep deer from running wild. In 2005 in Missouri, four people were killed in accidents involving deer, 289 injury accidents involving deer were recorded and another 3,213 accidents involving deer resulted in property damage, according to Missouri State Highway Patrol statistics.

Deer in Cape Girardeau

Cape Girardeau County is home to an estimated 9,300 deer. The number living in the city limits is unknown, but last year in Cape Girardeau deer were involved in 30 of the 1,900 vehicular accidents in the city, a number that does not include accidents on private property.

A month ago the Department of Conservation began talking to city officials about the possibility of allowing bowhunting within the Cape Girardeau city limits.

Darin Pettit, a local conservation agent for the Missouri Department of Conservation, met in the past week with both Mayor Jay Knudtson and with police chief Carl Kinnison to begin discussing the proposal. Both Knudtson and Kinnison stressed that the city at this point is just beginning to gather information about the proposal.

"I have no idea how it works and no idea what the dangers are," Knudtson said. "But I think it's worthy of consideration."

Kinnison said city officials looked at the idea a few years ago and decided not to pursue it. "You always have the safety concern," he said. But, he said, that should be weighed against the amount of accidents and damage deer cause.

If it happened, Pettit said, any bowhunting season could be extremely limited. "Not everybody would start shooting deer in the city."

Managing the population

Missouri and every other state manage their deer populations through hunting. Hunters kill more than 300,000 of the state's 1.4 million deer each year. But urban areas pose a problem. "As cities continue to sprawl, hunting becomes a less effective means of limiting the numbers," said Lonnie Hansen, a resource scientist with the Missouri Department of Conservation who specializes in deer.

But alternatives to hunting, among them trapping and relocation or euthanizing the deer and donating the meat to food banks, aren't very effective, Hansen said.

Trapping is expensive, and the DOC does not like moving deer around because of the danger of transmitting chronic wasting disease. Trapping also is stressful for deer, Hansen said. In one study, 20 percent of the deer trapped and moved died.

Some people advocate the use of birth control. "The problem is delivering it to an adequate number of does to control the numbers," Hansen said. "Nobody's been able to do that yet."

So the DOC works with communities around the state hoping they'll allow urban hunting. St. Louis and Kansas City communities have bowhunting programs. Springfield still has a ban but is going to revisit the issue, Hansen said.

Feeding problems

Traffic accidents aren't the only reason city deer are not always treated like Bambi. They dine on gardens, shrubbery and the crops on urban farms. Ben Stork owns a landscaping company and farms soybeans, wheat and milo, some of it in the city limits. Stork plans to discontinue farming 10 or 20 of the 150 acres he works inside the northern Cape Girardeau limits because the deer have been taking his soybean crops. "It's just not worth it," he said.

Deer love soybeans, he said. "They will go through during the flowering stage, especially early on, and later on they will just stomp them in the ground."

As a landscaper, Stork also sees the problems deer cause in clients' yards. Some of his customers have installed devices that make noises when they sense motion. "I have not seen anything that's very effective," he said.

The recent ice storms have left deer "pretty much empty-bellied," said Ken West, protection regional supervisor for the DOC. "They're pretty much going hungry. They will eat buds off trees, and they will break through the ice some. But they're just hurting. That's all there is to it."

West said small animals that can't break through the ice to get food are having trouble right now.

Considering the policy

Knudtson said he has received five or six complaints about deer in the past year, including some from nurseries, and had been thinking about the issue when Petit called him. He said he and the city council have not yet discussed the issue, which would require changing an ordinance banning the discharge of projectiles within the city limits.

Urban deer can divide a community, Hansen said. "One neighbor's feeding deer and loves them and the next-door neighbor sees them eating his garden and hates them."

Until recently, David Joe Wessel farmed some of the same acreage Stork now rents. He said deer fed on his soybeans and corn in a couple of fields. "Some people would have got upset," he said.

But Wessel hunts deer and likes to watch them. "It wasn't any big deal," he said.

If a community can agree on whether deer are a problem, the DOC is willing to help, Hansen said. He is unaware of any accidents occurring in urban bowhunting seasons in the state.

Seven city-owned properties in Columbia are open for bowhunting during the season that runs from Sept. 15 to Nov. 9 and from Nov. 21 to Jan. 15. In Columbia, bowhunters on public land are required to attend a class and achieve a special certification. More than 300 have registered for the 2007-2008 season. Though most do, hunters in Columbia are not required to shoot from an elevated stand, which couldantherlesshe possibility of an accident. Hunters can take an unlimited number of antlerless deer of any age. By the time the season arrives a fawn is two-thirds the size of a doe, Hansen said.

He is a bowhunter himself and lives in Columbia. He said most deer are shot with bows from a distance of 25 yards or less. Some bowhunters are proficient from 40 yards away, he said.

Use of bowhunting

University of Missouri biology professor Ray Semlitsch has permission to bowhunt in about a dozen places in Columbia. To hunt on the city-owned properties requires a permit issued by the city. The permit is issued only after hunters go through a training session. They are required to field dress deer away from any trails or roads. "They are very careful to talk about those kinds of things and the public's impression of hunters," he said.

Besides getting permission from a landowner to hunt, Semlitsch said he also talks to whomever owns the adjacent land and gets permission to cross their property or to retrieve a deer.

Individuals are probably split on the issue of hunting in the city, he said. Many are eager to reduce the deer populations in the city. "Some will say, I don't want my deer touched," he said.

Calculating the numbers of deer taken inside city limits is unreliable because hunters often don't want other others to know where the deer are. Columbia put the count at 25 for the season just concluded.

Danny Foutz, owner of Foutz's Hunting & Fishing Shop in Cape Girardeau, couldn't estimate how many bowhunters are in the area. He said a local Christian bowhunters group has 50 members. "There's a ton of bowhunters in Southeast Missouri," he said.

Twenty-five years ago, people in urban areas were much less willing to consider a bowhunting season. That has changed as deer have become more abundant in urban areas and, in some people's view, a nuisance. "People in Columbia accept this," Hansen said.

Stork, who is not a hunter, said deer often just stand and watch him as he drives a combine past them in a field. "Here in the city it's a haven for them," he said. "They feel real safe.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 137