About 100 people crammed into a Frelighsburg hall on a cold Saturday morning in January. They came to hear a wildlife expert from the Quebec Environment Department talk about what the government is doing to address the growing environmental crisis caused by the overabundance of white-tail deer.
Government estimates show that in some parts of the Townships, there are 4 times the number of deer per square kilometre than can be optimally sustained. The Frelighsburg area has among the worst overpopulation problems. The Lac Brome/Bolton region (Zone 5 East) is considered less severe but these estimates are rough and do not track concentrations of deer, like you see for example in Knowlton.
The problem is getting worse. Deer populations are growing as natural predators have been eliminated, interest in hunting has declined and winters are become milder overall. The impacts of this overpopulation are well-documented: Crop damage, increased traffic collisions, increased risks of Lyme disease, property damage, and increased environmental degradation due to excessive grazing. The local ecosystem is under threat. Deer are eating the regenerative undergrowth in our forests before it can get established, creating scarcity of food and habitat for other native species. They eat the grasses and plants that partridges and other birds need for nesting. They devour trillium and other native flowers from our fields and forests. What remains in our forests is an impoverished understory of ferns and non-native plants that deer won’t eat and that can’t support other species.
The Frelighsburg meeting did not provide many answers. The Quebec government has no coherent plan to address the crisis other than to say that it wants to encourage more people to hunt, and that property owners should invite hunters onto their land. But it has no plans to change its antiquated trophy-buck regulations – that were devised in a century where over-hunting was a problem – to bring them into line with today’s new reality, or to allow more hunting of female deer, which would actually help control population growth.
Quebec needs a new mindset at the local and provincial levels to address the deer overpopulation, and to take action where it is needed. Quebec should revamp its hunting rules and update them with a more coherent approach to encourage hunters and a conservation mindset that prioritizes the biodiversity challenges of today. Other jurisdictions have solved deer problems with innovative approaches that Quebec could learn from. New Jersey, for example, revamped its hunting regulations to allow licensed hunters to kill as many deer as they can, and to allow bow-hunting six months a year. Also, importantly, teams of professional deer-management hunters were created to cull deer in areas where density was causing damage to the environment. These measures have worked to reduce deer problems, and as a bonus, the teams donated 19,000 lbs of venison to foodbanks in New Jersey. Other options, like reintroducing native predators or sterilization, have not proven as effective.
It may be time to consider culls in certain areas of our communities, just as Longueuil did recently. One thing is clear: with deer populations exploding and our ecosystems under threat, it is unethical to do nothing.
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