City to keep using bow hunters to thin deer in Cincinnati's parks

Bow hunters will once again be allowed into 10 Cincinnati parks this year, amid evidence that the 10-year program has sharply reduced the deer population in Mount Airy Forest.

In addition, the parks are considering adding more deer "exclusions" or fences to keep the animals out.

Deer pose a threat to the flora of city parks, especially Mount Air and California Woods Nature Preserve, park officials say. The too numerous animals eat wildflowers such as trilliums and tree seedlings down to the ground. This cuts back on undergrowth and limits the future forest canopy, both of which can be important animal habitats.

The destruction of beneficial plants also can allow invasive species to take over.

"With a large deer population … it's very hard" to manage the parks to allow reforestation and maintain plants, Don Godby, the natural resources manager in charge of the deer program told park commissioners at a recent meeting.

In 2016, 157 hunters killed 139 deer in city parks. Just over half were taken out of Mount Airy, which at almost 1,500 acres is Cincinnati’s largest park. Mount Airy was established in 1911 out of several unproductive farms, and was the first municipal reforestation in America.

Godby said infrared aerial surveys of Mount Airy show the deer population is down 70 percent from its peak in 2001, before the hunting program began. (The animals show up as "hot spots" in the images.)

But the park, which had 101 deer in the 2016 survey, is too small for even that reduced number, he said. Ohio Department of Natural Resource officials told Godby a natural habitat is best when the deer population is 15 to 20 deer per square mile; Mount Airy currently has 44 per square mile.

A deer exclusion in California Woods, not far from the Ohio River on the city's far east side, works well in protecting plants from hungry deer, officials say. Behind the fence, built by one of the park's bow hunters and his son, trilliums grow freely and strong – important steps, since the plants resprout from tubers, but the tubers can't store food if the above ground vegetation has been gnawed off by deer.

With 113 acres of forest, California Woods features 53 species of trees and more than 200 species of herbaceous plants. It holds a nature center and a system of hiking trails.

The other parks in the hunting program are Alms, Ault, Drake, Glenway Woods, Magrish Preserve, Miles Edward, Seymour Preserve and Stanbery.

"It still needs to be understood that there are some that will never agree with or accept that we are managing the deer herd," former parks director Willie Carden wrote in a memo to city park board members, urging the continuation of the hunting program. The park board voted 5-0 to continue the program.

The program, which has culled a total of 1,354 deer from the 10 parks, started with sharpshooters from the Cincinnati police. After two years, volunteer bow hunters were brought in. 

The program requires closing some trails in the parks in late September and early October, but parks officials limit closures to certain days and hours so people wanting to see changing foliage colors can use the parks in safety and the hunters can operate without other human distractions. Night hunting was allowed at four parks in February.

The hunting program is separate from a deer sterilization program in Clifton.

The sterilization program, which has been in place for two years, has cut the deer population by an estimated 16 percent, according to city parks documents. Neighbors in Clifton put together and raised money for the sterilization program after park officials considered expanding bow hunting into Mount Storm Park and Rawson Woods nature preserve.

A special mammal, flower for Ohio

Deer overpopulation is a problem in modern Ohio. But the white-tailed deer, or Odocoileusvirginianus, "has been extremely important in Ohio's history," according to the website Ohio History Central.

The state tree, the Ohiobuckeye, is named because its nut resembles a deer, or buck's, eye. Buckeye is based on the Native American word "hetuck," meaning "eye of the buck."

White-tailed deer have been in Ohio since the end of the last Ice Age. They "played an important role in the lives of practically all of Ohio's prehistoric Native American cultures," according to the website. Native people ate deer meat, as well as using the hide for clothing and the bones and antlers for tools. 

As Europeans settled in modern-day Ohio, they used deer skins (often called buckskins) in barter and trade with the Native Americans and with other Europeans, Ohio History Central reports. The slang term "buck," referring to a dollar, dates to this time. According to Snopes.com, the term appears as early as 1748 when a traveler in what is now Ohio said he had “been robbed of the value of 300 Bucks.”

The deer population started to drop rapidly when settlers turned forests into farms – and killed the animals for food and hides. Ohio started with 24 million acres of forest; only four million acres remained by 1883, according to the state EPA.

Near the turn of the 20th Century, deer were so scarce there was no hunting season. In 1909, the white-tail was considered extinct in the state.

State wildlife agents eventually began reintroducing deer into the state. By 1943, hunting was again allowed - but only in three counties, according to an Ohio EPA history.

In 1988, state legislators named the white-tailed deer as the state's official mammal.

Two years earlier, the white trillium was named as Ohio's official wildflower. It was picked because the flower can be found in all of the state's 88 counties.