Tennessee wildlife more prevalent these days
Source: knoxnews.com, by KRISTIN M. HALL, Associated Press
January 16, 2007
NASHVILLE - Growing up on a Middle Tennessee farm, Pettus Read never saw a wild turkey or a white-tailed deer grazing on row crops and snacking on seeds and livestock feed.
Read, spokesman for the Tennessee Farm Bureau, says those problems are more common as Tennessee wildlife is flourishing decades after the state began working to bolster their numbers.
"The first person that is affected by overpopulation of deer is the farmer," Read said.
Carefully regulated hunting seasons are essential to controlling prospering wildlife as natural habitats give way to suburbs and cropland, contends Daryl Ratajczak, big game coordinator for the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.
As deer-hunting season ends this month, the state expects a record harvest with nearly 180,000 deer killed.
After subsistence hunting reduced deer and wild turkey to only a few thousand statewide in the early 1900s, restocking efforts and excellent natural habitats have allowed them to rebound and prosper.
Tennessee now is home to around 1 million deer and 295,000 wild turkeys, according to the latest estimates.
"The deer are at much higher density than in any other time," Ratajczak said. "There is no other predator other than hunters."
Wildlife officials adjust limits on the number of deer that can be killed during hunting season to reach a delicate balance between a healthy population and overabundance.
Three years ago, TWRA started allowing hunters to take up to three does a day in counties in Middle and West Tennessee, where populations are highest.
"It's just one way for us to increase the number of does getting killed in order to control the population," Ratajczak said.
Tennessee's wild turkey coordinator Gray Anderson said the full restoration of wild turkey, which began around the 1950s, was just completed in the last couple of years.
However, the progress of rebounding wildlife has its drawbacks, especially for farmers and homeowners.
"Some of the turkeys are adapting to urban areas, getting into bird feeders and eating crops," Anderson said. "They are definitely making themselves known."
Acres of soybeans and corn in heavily agricultural counties attract deer and turkeys, and Tennessee farmers are losing crops to wildlife more than ever before, Read said.
While no statewide numbers are available, the National Agricultural Statistics Service estimated crop and livestock losses from wildlife in the country totaled $944 million in 2002.
"There is very little as far as row crops that can be done to prevent it," Read said. "Home gardeners have fences, but average farmers in row cropping don't use fencing."
Dennis Goldsby is a Shelby County deer hunter who operates tndeer.com, a clearinghouse of information for hunters offering tips, photos and message boards.
Goldsby said that while the current generation of Tennessee hunters has access to healthy, bountiful herds, they face the same problems from suburban growth as wildlife face.
"That's a constant fight over the lack of land for habitat and hunting," Goldsby said. "There is less and less public land that hunters have free access to."
Goldsby said many Tennessee hunters have started forming groups to lease land to hunt on, but that's more expensive than some hunters can afford.
Some Tennessee farmers allow hunters to weed out the nuisance wildlife on their property, Read added.
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