Even some hunters. All agree they want deer in Pennsylvania, but in the right places and in manageable numbers. Deer, though beautiful, can also be devastating. They can, and will, dictate what other animals will survive there. With deer becoming more abundant and hunter numbers dropping, there's a real need for innovative solutions to control deer, he says.
Foresters say they're seeing that already.
The forest we have now is not the worry. Forests with no understory except for ferns, which survive only because deer really don't like to eat them, will have little or no ability to sustain species other than deer either, says Cindy Adams Dunn, executive director of the Pennsylvania Audubon Society, a 28,000 member group. There are a lot of ferns, there's an open forest structure, you can see forever. This is not a hunting problem, it's an ecological problem that far surpasses anything I ever imagined. We must fix the forests.