Scenic Hudson chief discusses group’s environmental work

Last of the series

By DEBORAH E. LANS

GHENT–Nature isn’t vindictive. Even though human actions have fostered many threats to our forests, the forests continue to provide their many benefits. Climate change, pollution and bad forestry management practices all take their toll, and yet (and among other things) forests continue to serve as a major means of carbon sequestration – a key to controlling the warming of the atmosphere – a source of health (emotional and physical) for people and the habitat for a vital ecological system.

With most of the woods in the county (and state) in the hands of private owners, the opportunity and responsibility to help our forests largely rests outside governmental management. And, while private citizens may not be able to eliminate the stressors that the woods confront, they can address and ameliorate many of them.

For example, for many years forestry practices called for large scale clearing with an emphasis on old trees. Those practices undermined the health of forests. As Bernd Blossey, professor of Natural Resources and the Environment at Cornell, explains, the carbon capture and biodiversity values are greatest in old trees. “If we cut a red oak that may be 300-400 years old, even if we replant the area with saplings, they won’t attain the same value for many, many years.”

So, land owners considering timber management – often as a revenue source – need to consider whether to shift their goals away from immediate cash flow and toward greater sustainability.

Even more importantly, and more immediately, landowners need to consider deer management. As deer are the greatest immediate threat to the future health of the woods (see the article in the June 13 issue of this paper), then addressing the damage that is caused by the overpopulation of deer is an obvious solution.

The benefits of deer “exclosures” – fencing an area to keep deer out – are often discussed when scientists address the damage that deer cause to the forest understory. Even within a few years, an area from which deer are excluded will begin to show the regeneration of orchids, trillium and other plants deer usually browse, and, more importantly, seedlings and saplings that can eventually regenerate the forest canopy. Similarly, within the exclosure, the presence of invasive species or species that crowd out seedlings – ferns, stilt grass, garlic mustard and barberry, for example – will diminish. (Moreover, with the lessening of invasives, the toxins that they release into the soil and that impair the uptake of nutrients by trees will also be lessened.)

Unfortunately, however, fencing a large woods area is not a particularly feasible project for a landowner, so while the value of reducing the effects of deer browse may be demonstrated by an exclosure, the technique does not lend itself to large-scale application.

Which leads to a discussion about controlling the deer population. The state DEC (Department of Environmental Conservation) controls hunting practices and licensing. At a recent presentation sponsored by Chatham’s Partners for Climate Action on “The Deer Dilemma” DEC Big Game Biologist Brendan Quirion noted that the effects of deer overpopulation are currently so severe that the DEC has shifted its deer management priority away from protecting the deer population to fostering forest regeneration. Based on its ecologically-based philosophy, as well as citizen input, the DEC’s specific goal is reduce the deer population in the Hudson Valley by 25% by 2030. A recent study suggests that a 25% reduction in the deer population could lead to a 15% increase in seedling density.

Various shifts in hunting practices would help to achieve that goal. As the Columbia Land Conservancy (CLC) President Troy Weldy puts it, “Hunters are chivalrous. They avoid does in favor of bucks, even though the bucks are less tasty.” Hunters also seek out bucks for their trophy value – that deer head with antlers hung on the wall.

Mr. Quirion explains, however, that hunting bucks does little by way of managing the deer population. When you kill a buck, you remove one animal from the woods. If hunting is focused on females, you remove not just the animal but its many future offspring as well. Good hunting stewardship suggests that a hunter take at least one female for every male.

A shift in thinking about hunting is also advocated by many. Hunting is not simply a sport. It is, as Mr. Quirion puts it, good environmental stewardship. Mr. Quirion’s wife took up hunting, for example, because it allows her to know both where her meat comes from and that it is sustainably sourced. In other words, wild venison is not produced by the industrial agricultural complex, and it does not arrive with the carbon footprint of having been transported a long distance, frozen and packaged. Moreover, unlike domesticated cattle, which are known to produce significant, deleterious methane emissions, wild venison do not add unhealthy gases to the atmosphere.

However, state laws enacted back when deer were scarce prevent the sale of domestic wild venison; most of what we eat is either sourced from New Zealand or farm-raised. A change in the laws could, accordingly, shift meat consumption to a locally- and sustainably-sourced product.

In a county where food insecurity is a significant issue, the availability of local wild venison can also ease a problem. While hunters may not sell venison, they can donate it. The DEC partners with several non-profit groups (the Venison Donation Coalition and Feeding New York State) to help provide venison through regional food banks. Hunters currently contribute nearly 40 tons of venison each year.

If hunting is the primary means of reducing the deer population, then access to hunting lands is important. Mr. Quirion notes that there are a variety of ways landowners can open their property to deer management. The DEC has a Deer Management Assistance Program and issues additional permits to address areas of severe deer impacts. In turn, CLC, which currently allows managed hunting on some of its public lands, is seeking funding to create a Hunter Match Program which would introduce landowners to responsible and ecologically-minded hunters. CLC is also exploring the use of the HuntStand app to schedule specific hunting times on its own properties.

Though landowners might shy away from allowing hunting on their lands for safety reasons, the DEC’s statistics suggest that hunting is relatively safe. Statewide in 2023 there were 12 hunting-related injuries, two fatal and six self-inflicted. Only nine involved deer hunting.

In some situations, culling – hunts conducted by professionals to achieve a rapid reduction in population – is sometimes used as a strategy to manage overpopulation. A recent article by the ecologist Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker (“Move in for the Cull,” June 17, 2024) explores the ethical, emotional and practical complications of deliberate culling for conservation purposes and observes that, though deliberate culling may sound distasteful, the fact is that the slaughter of farm-raised animals is a given.

Moreover, with humane means of population control, like contraception, currently considered to be both ineffective and costly, hunting seems the only feasible remedy for deer overpopulation at present.

Different techniques apply to repopulating forests and keeping pests and pathogens out. Charles Canham, the Cary Institute ecologist, stresses that while tree planting is a good long-term strategy, trees should be grown from bare root or seeds, because a tree with a root ball in potting soil may carry along harmful worms. Likewise, overfertilizing trees is actually counterproductive, as it will make the tree more attractive to pests.

Cutting away vines that can choke a tree is helpful. Avoiding driving over lawns – and hence tree roots – is also good.

And, as with all of nature, exposing young children to the woods and instilling a love of forests will help ensure a population of stewards for the future. Moreover, a study conducted in Finland found that three- to five-year-old city-dwelling children in a day care program, who were exposed to daily forest walks and gardening for as little as one month, saw improvement in their immune systems. The study supports the “biodiversity hypothesis” – a theory that says that exposure to a diverse environment enhances the human immune system.

To experience local forests and see the effects of stressors first-hand: The Rheinstrom Hill Audubon Sanctuary in Craryville (225 Cambridge Road) has some long-standing exclosures where the effects of excluding deer from an area can be seen. The recently-published field guide “From the Hudson to the Taconics,” authored by the Farmscape Ecology Program and Hudsonia Ltd., devotes nearly 100 pages to identifying the different types of forests and their publicly-accessible locations in the county, as well as species of environmental concern and potential stewardship methods. Montgomery Place, adjacent to the Bard Campus, is, as Dr. Canham puts it, an example of “a great old forest.” The DEC website includes materials on forest health and sets out the regulations that govern deer hunting.