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“I think the winter that we had put a lot of light on an issue that a lot of professionals already knew existed,” said Joe Barstow, who works in the city’s planning and engineering department.
While some people enjoy having deer come in their yards for a closeup view, others were alarmed and called the city. “We received numerous complaints,” Barstow said.
As luck would have it, La Crosse was just beginning an urban deer long-term management planning process and welcomed Onalaska’s participation. Barstow, city Parks and Recreation Director Dan Wick and Alderman Bob Muth have been attending the monthly urban deer meetings.
“They’re open-minded enough to realize that this is a regional issue, not just La Crosse,” Barstow said. “The door’s open to anyone that wants to be involved in it.”
In La Crosse, a study of Hixon Forest showed deer population higher than 100 per square mile, about 10 times what the area can support naturally. No studies have been done in Onalaska as far as deer numbers, but Barstow has done a study of development in Greens Coulee that showed the area went from around 40 homes in 1993 to about 350 now.
With all the home building going on in valleys adjacent to wooded hills, the deer are losing territory and becoming concentrated next to urban development.
La Crosse’s deer management committee is looking at a wide variety of remedies for deer overpopulation, including fencing or chemical sprays to repel deer and bringing in sharpshooters to thin the herd.
“We’re in the beginning stages of looking at this,” said Ron Lichtie, wildlife biologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ La Crosse office. “It hasn’t been finalized.”
Onalaska actually is considering taking a first step toward managing the urban deer population by banning deer feeding. The city’s Administrative and Judiciary Committee will hold a public hearing at 6 p.m. Wednesday, July 2, on a proposed ordinance that makes it illegal to feed deer in the city of Onalaska.
In urban settings, people feed deer mainly because they like the sight of deer in their back yards. Some hunters, too, set up feeding stations in rural areas, hoping to get deer in the habit of coming to a place where it will be easy to harvest them during hunting season.
Whatever the reason, feeding deer or any other animals, for that matter, is not good because it tampers with the natural order of things, putting nature out of balance. “Feeding of any wildlife, scientifically, is not a good idea because you’re putting an artificial energy source into a system,” Lichtie said. “At a certain point in time, that artificial food source can become a problem.”
One of the dangers of feeding deer, Lichtie noted, is it can promote spread of diseases, such as chronic wasting disease and tuberculosis, by bringing deer closer together than they ordinarily would be.
The state’s Conservation Congress has supported a ban on deer feeding and the state already has put limits of two gallons of feed per day per 40 acres. In areas where cases of chronic wasting disease have been found, there is a total ban on deer feeding.
Many municipalities across the state have banned deer feeding. “The science is there to show why not to (feed deer) ... The science has been out there for a long time,” Lichtie said. “We’d like to see a statewide ban on artificial feeding.”
Not only is feeding deer bad for them, Lichtie said, the overpopulation of deer also creates ecological problems such as wiping out plant species in an area by overgrazing and economic problems such as damaging crops and landscaping. And dense populations of deer near urban development also inevitably lead to car-deer collisions.
After the public hearing on Onalaska’s deer feeding ban ordinance, the ordinance will go back to the Administrative and Judiciary Committee for more discussion and possible changes before going to the Onalaska Common Council for approval.
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