Tag: sterilize

Deer Birth Control

  • Gardiner Joe Williamson says sterilization does nothing to solve the immediate problem of too many deer. (Photo courtesy of Adam Allington)

Whitetail deer have adapted pretty well to the suburbs. But… it means a lot of car-deer accidents. It also means deer munching on tulips and shrubs. Some people consider them pests and want to get rid of the deer. But instead of simply killing them, one city has decided to capture and sterilize a number of does.
Adam Allington reports, the results might point toward the future of urban wildlife management.

Transcript

Whitetail deer have adapted pretty well to the suburbs.

But… it means a lot of car-deer accidents. It also means deer munching on tulips and shrubs. Some people consider them pests and want to get rid of the deer.

But instead of simply killing them, one city has decided to capture and sterilize a number of does.

Adam Allington reports, the results might point toward the future of urban wildlife management.

It’s a crisp night in Town and Country, Missouri…home to some 10,000 souls…and about 800 deer.

“There goes a deer over there, it’s just to the left of the tree, you can barely see it.”

Joel Porath is a wildlife regional supervisor for the Missouri Department of Conservation. Just like humans, whitetails he says, are right at home in the quiet cul du sacs of suburbia.

“They have all the food resources, they don’t have hunting and they don’t really have predators, so mainly vehicles are what kill them in communities like this.”

Lynn Wright sits on Town and Country’s board of aldermen. Despite the accidents she says most folks like seeing the deer around…kind of reminding them that they don’t live in the city.

“But when you start going from 2 or 3 and seeing 10 or 12 in the backyard you do start getting concerned about that.”

The car accidents were a problem, but Wright says people also complained about damaged trees and landscaping. Still, the town resisted the easiest solution—to just hire sharpshooters to come in and kill all the deer.

Instead, they explored alternative methods…this is sound from a department of conservation video…it shows four deer eating corn in a back yard…just then, a large dropnet is released…sending them into a flailing frenzy until technicians rush in with tranquilizer shots.

The deer are then brought to Steve Timm. Timm is a veterinarian with White Buffalo Incorporated. Its a company that specializes in sterilizing deer.

“We’ve got two does coming in. We’re going to sterilize them by removing ovaries.”

Timm operates out of a small eight by sixteen foot trailer… When the does arrive they’re hoisted on to an operating table and prepped for surgery.

“I’ve located the left ovary here, and so I’ll clamp it, bring it to the surface, use cautery to prevent any bleeding.”

The whole process takes about 20 minutes. The deer are then stapled up, fitted with reflective collars and released.

Timm says the theory is simple—fewer fauns mean less deer eating shrubs and running into cars.

“The early information suggests, that if there are some deer in the environment, especially our sterile does, the other deer have less tendency to move in.”

But not everyone backs the sterilization approach.

Joe Williamson is a retiree who loves to garden. Walking around his yard he points out flowering magnolias, yews, Japanese maples…basically, a kind of all-night deer buffet.

“This is a good example of antler rubs, this is called Staghorn Sumac. The bucks rub their antlers on here and they break them off, you see all these…its just wrecked.”

Williamson says sterilization does nothing to solve the immediate problem of too many deer. It’s also much more expensive. Town and Country paid White Buffalo 150-thousand dollars to sterilize 112 does, and kill another 100.

But, Joel Porath of the Department of Conservation says in the end, the best solution may involve sterilizing some deer…and killing others.

“Could you imagine if we stopped allowing deer hunting in the state? You know we kill around 300,000 dear each year and it doesn’t take very long for the population to jump back up. So, they do need to continue to do something in Town and Country down the road.”

By the end of spring Porath says the department should have enough information to see if sterilization makes sense for other suburban areas.

For The Environment Report, I’m Adam Allington.

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Ten Threats: Concrete Shores

  • Hardened shorelines protect buildings, roads, and homes, but many developers say a more natural method should be used. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Along many Great Lakes cities, long concrete or stone seawalls protect property against
wind and wave erosion. It’s a hardening of the shoreline that some people say is
necessary to protect expensive real estate. But some scientists and environmentalists say
it’s part of one of the ‘Ten Threats to the Great Lakes. They’re worried those concrete
seawalls are not only hurting the environment… in the long run, they’re hurting the
economy. Lynette Kalsnes has this report:

Transcript

In our series ‘Ten Threats to the Great Lakes,’ we’ve been looking at how humans make
changes that affect the health of the lakes. Lester Graham is our guide through the series.
He says the next report shows how far we’ll go to try to manage nature:


Along many Great Lakes cities, long concrete or stone seawalls protect property against
wind and wave erosion. It’s a hardening of the shoreline that some people say is
necessary to protect expensive real estate. But some scientists and environmentalists say
it’s part of one of the ‘Ten Threats to the Great Lakes. They’re worried those concrete
seawalls are not only hurting the environment… in the long run, they’re hurting the
economy. Lynette Kalsnes has this report:


(waves lapping against concrete wall)


In the middle of a miles-long concrete shoreline, there’s a tiny beach. Steve Forman points
toward a small bluff at the base of a tree. The professor of earth and environmental sciences at
the University of Illinois at Chicago says the sand, grass and dunes help soften the impact of
waves and rain.


“This kind of relief is what you’d see in many natural coastlines, a coastline like this can
accommodate change better than one that’s been concreted up.”


Just feet away, the concrete picks back up, like a stark white runway that bisects the land and the
lake. Concrete revetments like these in Chicago are a familiar sight in urban areas across the
Great Lakes.


Roy Deda is with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps manages much of the
construction on public shorelines. Deda says hardening the shore is one way of protecting against
erosion.


“Where hardening of the shoreline is important and used, is where you have an existing
community in an urban area like Chicago. You have a lot of development in place already, and
basically you’re protecting what’s been built over a long history.”


Deda says it protects property. But scientist Steve Forman says using concrete walls comes at a
cost: the destruction of natural systems that are often helpful.


Forman says wetlands and stream valleys normally act like a sponge to absorb high lake levels.
They also release some of the water back when lake levels are low. Forman says concrete can’t
buffer those fluctuations.


“It makes the extremes potentially even more extreme in terms of lake level variations.”


So, when there’s a rainstorm, Forman says the water runs off the concrete quickly… instead of
being absorbed across sand or wetlands slowly.


He says the same thing is true for the water flowing into the lakes from rivers.


Discharge into rivers can go up by 50 times the amount it would if natural areas buffered the
rivers.


“Any time we change the landscape from its natural components, we also change the plumbing of
the Great Lakes. We change the way water is routed in and around and through the Great Lakes
as well.”


It’s not only rushing rivers and lake levels that cause problems.


When the shoreline is hardened… the wildlife and organisms that once lived there disappear.


Cameron Davis is with the Alliance for the Great Lakes. He says many rare species live in that
narrow ribbon where the land meets the water.


“When we harden the shorelines, we basically sterilize them in a lot of ways, because we’ve not
providing the kinds of habitat and cover that we need for many of them.”


And beyond the effect on wildlife… hardening the shoreline can also be a bad economic decision.


Steve Forman says permanent structures built near the shores are not as stable as they might seem
when lake levels are high and winter storms cause big waves that erode the land underneath them.


“When the lake levels go up, the erosion rates are just phenomenal…what you see are hanging
stairs everywhere, instead of stairs that take you down to the beach, they’re hanging over the lake,
basically.”


That’s why scientists and planners are taking action. The Alliance for the Great Lakes’ Cameron
Davis is calling on planners to balance protecting the shoreline … with preserving ecology.


“Frankly I don’t think shoreline planning across the region is that great. There really is no single
unifying policy we’re all using to guide what our shorelines ought to look like.”


He’s hoping that some cities will experiment with restoring natural areas along their shorelines…
He says we need to see if in the long run, nature can do a better job of protecting the shores.


For the GLRC, I’m Lynette Kalsnes.

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Controlling Feral Cat Colonies

Cats are the nation’s most popular household pets. But despite this, millions of cats are abandoned each year. These free-roaming cats grow up without much human contact. They live in cat colonies near apartment buildings, strip malls, or anyplace else where food scraps get tossed into dumpsters or trash cans. And they have an impact on the environment as they compete with other wildlife for food and shelter. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rick Pluta has this report:

Transcript

Cats are the nation’s most popular household pets. But despite this, millions of cats are abandoned each year. These free-roaming cats grow up without much human contact. They live in cat colonies near apartment buildings, strip malls, or anyplace else where food scraps get tossed into dumpsters or trash cans. And they have an impact on the environment as they compete with other wildlife for food and shelter. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rick Pluta has this report:


It’s late at night and Donna Dunn and a couple of friends are sitting in a parked car in a suburban Detroit cemetery.


They’re smoking, eating fast food, and waiting for cats.


“There’s the pregnant female, right there under the truck…”


They’re hoping the cats wander into one of the dozens of live traps they’ve set up. The prize catch is a pregnant female.


“What’d you get? Is it a girl? Yeah, it’s a girl… a pregnant female. Yes! Alright!….”


Donna Dunn is a veterinary technician, who learned about feral cats through her job. She hooked up with a sprawling network of thousands of feline lovers who take care of feral cats living in cat colonies.


Dunn figures there are about 75 wild or abandoned cats wandering the grounds of this cemetery. Some of the cats live in tunnels burrowed in the dirt, or in buildings on the cemetery grounds. Wild cats can also live in vacant buildings or abandoned vehicles. And, Dunn figures, there would soon be a lot more cats if something wasn’t done about it.


“One female will have a minimum of two litters a summer, average litter is five kittens per litter. So you’re looking at 10 kittens average per female in here. The first nine females we took out of here, eight were pregnant. That would’ve produced 40 kittens.”


(Sound of trap)


The trapped cats will spend the night in cages stacked side-by-side in a volunteer’s garage. They’ll go the vet’s in the morning, before they are returned to their feral cat colony. Donna Dunn says the neutered cats are more content, and less likely to fight with other cats and wild animals.


She says “trap, neuter, and release” is a humane alternative to turning strays over to a shelter, where most of the cats would be killed.


But “trap, neuter, and release” is also controversial idea. Critics say it doesn’t really address the problem of feral cats roaming the streets. They say it’s simply not possible to sterilize millions of these cats.


Eileen Liska is with the Michigan Humane Society. She says wild cats have a profound effect on the environment. They can upset the ecological balance of a field or a neighborhood by killing off birds and other wildlife. They can also carry feline leukemia and other diseases. Liska says euthanizing un-adoptable felines is the most compassionate approach.


“Cats living out in the streets equals suffering. I mean, they are suffering. They don’t have proper food sources. They’re exposed to the weather and they’ve got the danger of being attacked, injured or killed by other wildlife, especially when they’re fighting for the same ecological niches. The cats absolutely are in competition with possums, skunks, and raccoons, and raccoons can grow quite large and be quite aggressive and we know that they kill cats that come, that get in their way.”


But Liska also says the growing number of wild cats shows the current approach isn’t working. She wants to raise more money to fund new animal control programs. But she’s not finding a lot of support for a tax to do that among Michigan’s politicians.


Michigan, like most states, requires dogs to be on a leash or fenced in when they’re outside. Farmers demanded the laws at the beginning of the twentieth Century because wild canines were attacking livestock.


There’s no similar cry yet to do something about feral cats, and no one seems to think that licensing cats would begin to get at the problem. Wisconsin proposed allowing hunters to shoot strays. That idea was tabled after animal rights groups protested.


“Right there. See it? Right out here. That’s a little one. Judy, is there food in there? Should I check it?”


Donna Dunn and her friends would like to see every state to adopt trap-neuter-and-release for dealing with stray cats. Until then, she says, her cohorts will try and deal with the problem one cat colony at a time.


For the GLRC, this is Rick Pluta.

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Methyl Bromide Use to Increase

Starting January first, the U.S. will let farms and certain
other businesses use more of the pesticide methyl bromide. But
environmentalists may go to court over the issue. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

Starting January 1st, the U.S. will let farms and certain other businesses use more
of the pesticide
methyl bromide. But environmentalists may go to court on the issue. The Great
Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:


Methyl bromide is used to sterilize soil before planting and to fight invasive
insects that come
into the U.S. on wooden pallets. But scientists say emissions of methyl bromide
harm the ozone
layer. In the 1980s, the U.S. agreed to phase out use of the compound, except for
critical cases
where there are no feasible alternatives.


Methyl bromide use is only a third of what it was in 1991. But the Bush
administration wants to
let that figure rise to 37 percent this coming year. David Doniger is with the
Natural Resources
Defense Council. He says he doubts whether more methyl bromide is needed.


“The problem is the critical use exemptions have mushroomed… way out of control.
So we’re
going backwards.”


The U.S. has agreed to reduce use of methyl bromide in 2006… but critics say that
promise may not be kept. The NRDC says it’s likely to challenge the 2005 plan in
court. An
Indiana company is one of the nation’s largest suppliers of methyl bromide.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

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