New effort aims to thin deer herd, fight food insecurity
In 1922, fishermen rescued an exhausted buck swimming in Nantucket Sound and set him free on the island. A few years later, a summer resident bought two does to keep that lone buck company. Few could have predicted the dramatic, unintended consequences of those well-meaning acts.
Nantucket Locals Are Dealing With a New Off-Season Reality and It’s a Booming Population
Locals are slowly getting back to normal as Labor Day marked the unofficial end to summer, but as they said goodbye to the influx of visitors, they’re still dealing with a growing population of of a different kind—deer.
Could Expanded Deer Hunting Solve Nantucket’s Food Insecurity Problem?
Mike Leavitt was sitting around a dinner table with a group of his friends when the conversation turned to a topic that has vexed many Nantucketers: it’s hard to drive anywhere at night on the island without almost hitting a deer. Why, Leavitt and his friends wondered, hasn’t anyone done anything about the overabundance of […]
Does Nantucket Really Have 10,000 Deer? State Biologists Think So
State wildlife officials have long said Nantucket has one of the largest concentrations of deer in Massachusetts. But could the population actually exceed 10,000 deer? That would be an incredibly large population for a small, isolated geographic area, and a steep increase from previous estimates. But Martin Feehan, the deer and moose biologist for the […]