California wildlife officials last week moved forward with a plan to wipe out the Santa Catalina Island black-tailed deer herd: extermination.
The plan has long pitted locals on the island off the coast of Los Angeles against the Catalina Island Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental group that manages 88 percent of the island’s terrain. The sanctuary considers mule deer not native to the island and posing a significant threat to local biodiversity, water quality and fire resilience.
Permits issued by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife allow the conservancy to eliminate about 1,800 deer on the island within five years, mostly using hired shooters who kill the deer with bait. Outside the island’s only city of Avalon, gunmen can open fire at night and use helicopters and drones to help locate deer. Helicopters can also be used to drop nets on deer for capture.
With deer numbers in decline, the permit envisions using dogs to help shooters find and kill stragglers. The license also allows the sanctuary to capture the deer, sterilize them, fit them with GPS collars and release them back into the wild.
Meat from these animals will either be used to feed captive birds in the California Condor Recovery Program or given to tribal partners.
However, many locals deride this method of extermination as cruel and view the deer as an iconic local species, despite the fact that the deer were introduced in the 1920s to establish a huntable population. An online petition to “Stop the Mule Deer Killing on Catalina Island” has nearly 23,000 signatures.
“Mule deer have been part of Catalina Island’s landscape for nearly a century, and their presence has become an important part of the island’s identity,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn wrote in a recent letter to California wildlife officials. “This plan ignores the deeply held values of many Catalina Island residents and visitors. I continue to hear from my constituents who have lived on the island for decades and have come to cherish these deer.”
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Recreational hunting will continue on Catalina Island, but the preserve says it has failed to reduce the population sufficiently.
According to the Conservancy, Santa Catalina Island’s native flora evolved in the absence of mule deer, leaving plants with few evolved defense mechanisms to limit animals from eating them. Heavy browsing pressure allowed non-native grasses to colonize areas that once held native plants, causing the island’s scrubland to disappear and become invasive grassland.
The preserve plans to eliminate deer while replanting native plants and fighting back invasive plants. The conservancy says replanting native shrubs on the island and other plans will help support efforts to recover endangered species, including the Catalina Island fox and Catalina Hutton’s green parrot, a small songbird endemic to the island.
“The ecological challenges facing Catalina Island cannot be addressed in a long-term, sustainable manner as long as introduced black-tailed deer continue to impede the recovery and recovery of the island’s natural habitat,” a conservation management plan reads.
