Deer seem to be very abundant and causing damage in other parks in the North East. Look at the number of car/deer collisions, the numbers are astounding.
I think the Gunks just found a second source of revenue: bring on the bow hunters! That season in the Preserve area is open for 6 weeks. I'm sure many Hunters would gladly pay the day use fee to hunt in the preserve.

I recall seeing a TV documentary about an excessive deer population problem in Suffolk County. Among the non-lethal solutions are feeding deer food laced with a sterilizing drug or shooting them with a drug-laden dart with similar result.
When it comes to invasive species, the worst by far is Homo sapiens.

East, the Preserve already has a fairly open hunting policy. As our cougar chasing, deer hating Yorick points out though, it is not as successful as it needs to be. There are probably a number of factors contributing to this, some of which can't be controlled by the Preserve.

Yorick, excellent post as usual, but you didn't mention a key ingredient that has been taken out of the ecosystem! Anyone hazard a guess?

There you go Julie, just take a white-tailed deer up the route with you.

Two come to mind. Fire and mountain lions.

Having climbers swarming the area every day would seem to me to help force the deer into smaller areas and ultimately decrease the breeding. Yeah, that's the ticket, lots of climbers on Minnewaska to "control the deer". I would be glad to maintain sterilizing salt licks at all the crags and visit them on a rotating basis.

I'm a giver!

CITM, Rob.

I don't hate deer. Decades of game-agency mismanagement has brought us to this crisis. Few learned from Aldo Leopold and the lesson of the Kaibab Plateau 80 years ago.

http://depts.alverno.edu/nsmt/youngcc/research/kaibab/story1.html

My apprehension with prescribed burns is that they aren't going nearly far enough. Massive deer exclosures like PA is building around its state timber harvests are needed to be in place long enough to ensure that the burned area is permitted to recover above the browse-line, otherwise deer-resistant natives and invasives will continue to do their thing. A 4,000 acre fence should have been installed around last year's Minnewaska fire, because it will be re-seeded with invasives catching a ride on animals and recreationists moving through the burned area.

As I've been nattering on about for the last year or so, we now have more than a decade of predator ecology research from Yellowstone, Zion, Yosemite, the Olympics, and Jasper to provide a model for predator-dependent ecosystem management.

It's way too late to propose introducing cougars to save the Gunks. It's not too late to use predator surrogates - human volunteers and border collies - to complement the hunt, to mimic predator presence, since we've learned that predator presence in the landscape, more than direct predation, alters and restricts ungulate browsing behavior. Surrogates have been tried only to haze elk and deer out of residential areas and to protect nurseries and crops; not for ecosystem recovery.

The Partnership would need to try a variation of dovetailed established wildlife hazing management with ground-breaking predator ecology research...an intervention that would be entirely experimental.

mmmmm....venison. Had some great venison products in Talkeetna, AK last year. Those folks know what to do with deer.

Sounds like a great project for a privately funded, environmental research/education oriented Preserve.

And they can sell MP branded venison to the City restaurants.

Dude, when were you in Talkeetna? I was there briefly in early May. Went to some hotel bar and got L-I-T up after a good climbing trip.