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Deer Hunting

Growing up in the suburbs of Long Island, I never really thought about hunting or thought it was something remote from me. It wasn’t until many years later when I moved to Greenwich, Connecticut to manage a 250 acre nature preserve that hunting became a very close reality.

Audubon Greenwich had begun a white-tailed deer hunting project the year before I got there, and it was my responsibility to manage it. There was a serious overpopulation of deer in Greenwich, and when there is an overpopulation of deer, they destroy the forest habitat by eating wildflowers and the forest understory shrubs. Ten deer per square mile can sustain the flora and birdlife, but Fairfield County it is more like… The deer strip the low-lying brush, and thereby deer threaten the local survival of those bird species, which need low shrubs for nesting. The multi-year ongoing project at Audubon Greenwich has been successful in reducing the herd, and inexpensive using a strictly monitored local bowhunting club.

White-tailed deer buck

The state’s deer population has been rising for the last 50 years. Incredible as it may seem, in the early 1900s, the statewide deer population was estimated at less than 50 deer because mountain lions, coyote and other animals culled their numbers. Today wildlife experts believe Connecticut’s deer population may be around 100,000.

But in the past ten years, because of efforts by the DEP to expand hunting seasons and work with different towns to open public lands, nature conservancies, water company properties and private properties to hunting, the deer population is stabilizing and, in some areas, beginning to go down. Continue reading →

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Bird watching is a different kind of sport. It is also a hobby, and recreational and educational too. It opens your eyes to the natural world right in your own backyard and in far away places. You can do it all year round. You can do it anywhere: at home, in the car, on vacation, at work.  It’s cheap. Every season, every month, brings some new bird event: hundreds of shorebirds at the beaches, jeweled hummingbirds sipping at flowers, hawks soaring over marshes, gold finches in your yard. Spring is the peak of bird watching fervor, the time when the colorful migrating birds come back north through our area. But bird watching in the fall brings tens of thousands of birds migrating south for the winter, and is an exciting time for bird watchers.

Thousands of hawks are migrating through Connecticut right now. Look up, they are there. Volunteers even count them at they move from one state to another. One good place to see them is the Audubon Greenwich Hawk Watch every day from now until the end of November. A hawk watch counter is there every day and will give you the scoop and help you identify the majestic birds.  The hawks are also perched on highway light poles waiting for a good meal to walk by. In a few weeks, ducks and geese will be on our waterways by the thousands too. It is a spectacular site with snow geese flying in like, well, like snow.  As winter approaches there will still be much to see. Winter brings eagles, and time to observe bird behavior close range right in your yard. It is a whole year round cycle. Continue reading →