Islanders find relief in deer hunt Out-of-control herds thinned since residents renew shooting

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For the first time in decades, all the freezers on Swans Island are full of venison, and almost everyone is sporting hunter orange.

The islanders, and their neighbors on Cranberry Isles and Frenchboro, are in the throes of a fall hunting season that their parents and grandparents missed for decades.

In the mid-1940s, the state Legislature banned hunting on most of Maine’s populated offshore islands, mostly in response to a fear of shooting accidents.

But over the years, dozens of deer swam from the mainland to the islands, establishing booming populations on almost every bit of land. Only Matinicus, so far out in the sea no deer can make the swim, is immune to the problem.

“They were like a domestic goat herd, chewing everything up,” said Steve Wheaton of Swans Island.

Islanders tell of rosebushes and shade trees gnawed flat. They surrounded their gardens with yards of chicken wire and hung noisy charms, only to lose every tomato anyway. Birdfeeders and window boxes became deer feeding troughs. Some residents even struggled with “raccoon deer” that would sneak onto porches to eat citrus rinds out of trash cans.

But “the kicker” occurred a few years ago when emergency medical volunteers couldn’t get the fire truck to the scene of a car-deer accident on Swans Island – because it struck another deer en route, said state wildlife biologist Thomas Schaeffer, who is based in Jonesboro but handles the islands. Local people had always shot a few deer, quietly and illegally, just to keep them out of the roads and gardens. And Monhegan and Peaks islands spent thousands to hire sharpshooters to thin the herds.

In spite of those efforts, Schaeffer always believed that only a full-scale, official hunting season could manage these out-of-control populations. For decades, residents had opposed such a hunt, worried about the safety of shooting on a small island.

“These are really rural places. There’s no reason why hunting can’t be utilized,” Schaeffer said.

The breakthrough came in the late ’90s in Cranberry Isles, where residents, fed up with the loss of their plants and the risk of contracting Lyme disease from deer ticks, advocated for a deer hunt on the town’s five islands. Local legislators proposed, and their colleagues approved, a law allowing the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to approve island hunting, provided a majority of island residents voted in support.

When Cranberry Isles held the first public meeting to discuss the deer hunt, Schaeffer expected that summer people in attendance would defeat the idea. Instead, one woman stood and asked how many people present had a friend or family member who had been infected with Lyme disease. Almost everyone in the room, including the summer residents, raised a hand.

“They completely blew me away,” Schaeffer said. “There are dire consequences to unregulated populations, and that’s what these people saw.”

Thus Cranberry Isles became the first to start a hunt in 2000, and Frenchboro and Swans Island soon followed suit.

Not all islander communities supported the hunt, however. Isle au Haut continues to oppose the idea of bringing hunting to their community, and many islanders elsewhere, who have fed the deer and treated them like pets, saw the hunt as cruel.

“We weren’t without conflict,” said Richard Beal of Cranberry Isles, recalling a local woman who told a reporter that the beaches were awash with blood during that first hunt.

The islands that brought back hunting each held at least one “depredation hunt,” during which each local hunter was allowed to kill multiple deer, in an effort to quickly start reducing the herds.

After hundreds of deer were killed, Cranberry Isles joined the regular DIF&W hunt in 2001, opening hunting to anyone with a license, including nonresidents.

Frenchboro went with a regular hunt this fall, and Swans Island is scheduled for next fall.

Though the depredation hunt that continues on Swans Island allows each hunter to shoot six deer, none of the hunters, who stopped by the local general store for lunch on a recent Saturday, had any luck.

“People used to think of Swans Island as deer heaven. It’s no different from the mainland now,” said Josh Joyce, a lobsterman who serves as tagging agent for the town. “It’s gotten to be a real hunt.”

Most hunters didn’t enjoy the first hunt, in which 270 “tame” deer were killed, often at point-blank range because the animals didn’t know to run away.

“The first two years, you might as well call it a slaughter. It’s a hunt this year,” said Shaun Lemoine of Swans Island.

But the depredation hunt was a necessary evil to cull the unhealthy deer, Schaeffer said.

Herds of island deer ate anything and everything, regardless of whether it provided the nutrients they needed. Islanders even saw herds of deer grazing kelp that washed up on the beaches. As a result, the deer were no more than half the size of those on the mainland and many had deformities, like tiny ears and horns.

“You’d have to shoot a six-pack of deer here on the island to make one from the mainland,” Wheaton joked.

Some of the killed deer weren’t even eaten, just buried because of the deformities. Many of the healthy animals were butchered and the excess meat was donated to local charities.

The deer population was simply unsustainable, and they were starting to starve to death before the hunts were established. Every spring, Swans Island residents, like Joe Staples, would find dead yearling deer amid the melting snow on their property.

“They were just skin over bones,” he said.

After just a few years, locals are already seeing an impact, and they think that the hunts are working.

Car accidents have decreased dramatically. In fact, an entire day of driving around Swans Island produced no deer sightings, unless one counted the recently tagged buck hanging from Spencer Joyce’s front porch.

“[Before the hunt] you’d have to dodge deer just going across the five miles of road from one end of the island to the other, and it wasn’t just one deer, it was nine deer,” Wheaton said.

Other towns have seen the same results.

“We’ve got a great big dog, and the deer would just look at the dog and go back to feeding,” said Myron “Mike” Lenfestey of Frenchboro. “They’re acting like an actual wild animal now.”

And those deer that are killed are healthier. Tagging agents had recorded almost 60 deer shot on Swans Island by the second to the last Saturday of the season, and they had seen a significant number of bucks with big antlers and deer in excess of 100 pounds.

Many are still worried about what might happen when the hunt is opened up, and anyone with a license can travel to Swans Island to hunt. Families have passed down stories of a 1950s experiment with hunting, when bullets from non-residents’ guns supposedly went through people’s houses. The resident-only depredation hunt just feels safer, the islanders say.

“Everybody knows everybody. We know where to go, where to shoot, where not to shoot,” explained Lemoine.

But this far, the cost of ferry travel and the fewer, more skittish deer have limited the influx of off-island hunters, Schaeffer said.

“We’ve cleaned up all the easy shots, all the heater-hunter shots,” he said, referring to people who hunt from their vehicles. “We’ve taken away the lollipop.”

Despite the worries, most people in these island towns want to see the hunts continue. Evidence that the plan is working is apparently all around them. On Swans Island, Spencer Joyce planted tiny evergreen trees, and they survived the summer. On Great Cranberry, Beal saw twin fawns this spring, a sign of a healthy population.

“It’s better for the deer this way,” said Galen “Sput” Staples of Swans Island. “It needed to be done.”