The biggest of the littlest
About four years ago, I remember counting more than 300 deer in the large fields of Plummer when I drove to town. This year, there were only a few does with fawns and what appeared to be no bucks. As soon as hunting season opened, all the does were quickly killed off. Now, we have only a handful of yearling fawns left in those fields. It appears that we are now taking the biggest of the littlest of everything.
This leaves us with a whole new generation of slightly dysfunctional deer that have no mothers to raise them. Instead of adjusting to the obvious overkill in this unit, the Fish and Game ramped up deer tag sales and made the season longer. This year a person was able to buy two deer tags instead of one.
The past 10 years have seen habitat destroyed at an alarming rate with aggressive clear cutting and poisoning of our forests. There are thousands of clear-cut acres that now look just like the moon on the St. Joe River. This poisoning is done so as to destroy brush (what the deer eat) so newly planted trees have no competition as they grow toward the next tree harvest ... and even some of them don't make it past the poisoning.
These areas are re-sprayed every year for the first three to five years from a helicopter while leaving it constantly looking like a gray, dead wasteland. Not even a rabbit or a bird could make a living in it. How much of this poison is getting into the river? No one is paying attention because this is legal on corporate logging land. (Environmental coalitions banned these poisoning practices from public Forest Service land in the late '70s.)
The St. Joe River (claiming to be a scenic river) has taken a huge hit as logging companies continue to annihilate what is left while destroying habitat at break-neck speeds. There appears to be no rules. It was never a huge problem in the past when we did things in moderation. Wildlife could always spring back as long as there were healthy numbers and plenty of habitat for them to move to.
Now that greed has taken over the reins, we see wildlife being squeezed out and losing ground at a disturbing rate. Whole drainages are being lost overnight as wildlife populations plummet to catastrophically low levels. Nothing can recover without habitat. Our deer are in trouble while the elk have become experts at hiding. This imbalance has everything to do with the "two legged" kind of predator rather than that of the wolf or the mountain lion.
When you add trapping, poaching, night vision glasses, tree cams, high powered long distance rifles, more tags and longer seasons to the mix, you end up with a toxic elixir for disaster that can't sustain itself. I'm surprised that they haven't made a heat-seeking drone that will detect seasonal targets where you can just push a button to kill a deer or an elk.
What we need now is for the Fish and Game to create less office staff and start using those shiny new trucks for more patrolling and enforcement in the field. The way it works now is more of a reactive system that responds to problem calls. What we need is a more proactive system to where you never know if a "game warden" will show up. Washington has been very successful with this approach when it comes to poaching, etc.
Hiking trails (posted for hikers only) are intended to create a peaceful environment for both hikers and wildlife. It is hard to find one of these trails anymore that hasn't been chewed up by ATVs or bikes, creating more damage and sound pollution than ever before. Again, there is no enforcement. It's pretty much "do whatever you want" in Idaho. The Fish and Game and the Forest Service need to step up and be what they were intended to be ... enforcers of the law.
Not enough money? Maybe they could put some of those trapping classes and wolf killing dollars toward gas money so they could actually get out there and see what is happening in our forests today. Helicopters and planes aren't cutting it ... and don't those cost money too?
Bonnie Brown is a resident of Plummer.