Delaware hunters worry about precedent of privately leasing public lands

An early announcement about a new deer management program that would privately lease public land in Sussex County has area hunters up in arms.

“Our tax money buys this land,” said hunter Guy Pusey of Greenwood. “Our tax money pays the people that work there. It’s the principle of it here. It’s just wrong.”

On Jan. 30 the Delaware Forest Service announced on social media that state officials were planning a pilot program that would offer exclusive hunting rights on more than 1,000 acres of state forest land in an effort to reduce crop damages and losses stemming from southern Delaware’s robust – and hungry – deer population.

The proposed program includes two tracts in the 12,000-plus-acre Redden State Forest near Georgetown: the 826-acre Tunnel tract, west of U.S. 113 near Georgetown, and the 245-acre Long tract, which is northeast of Millsboro and separate from the other forest tracts. Leases would be offered through the state’s bidding process, said state Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Stacey Hofmann.

“The lease of the tracts will be open for bid in-state, Delawareans only,” Hofmann said in an email. “At the end of the program, the results will be evaluated to see if the program worked to curtail damage to agricultural lands.”

The number and cost of the leases have not yet been determined, she said. Those two tracts in Redden were chosen for the pilot because they include "large forested blocks of land largely inaccessible to Delaware hunters."

The lack of specifics on the program has left hunters drawing their own conclusions.

“I’m trying to figure out the facts and take everything with a grain of salt until I get information myself,” said James Blackstock, a Smyrna resident who primarily hunts on public lands. “When I called, I was told they kind of jumped the gun on the social media post and they’re not sure what they’re going to do.”

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 Dozens of comments shared on Facebook have offered alternative suggestions, such as allowing hunting during the off-season or allowing hunters to harvest antlerless deer, or female deer called does, in October and December, instead of leasing the land and potentially closing it to the general public.

Sen. Brian Pettyjohn, R-Georgetown, said he also has concerns about the pilot program.

“These are state-owned, publicly owned forest tracts. To have them leased and locked out of the general public hunters to be able to go there and hunt, I’m concerned about it,” Pettyjohn said in a phone interview last week.

Pettyjohn said he will be meeting with Department of Agriculture Secretary Michael Scuse this week.

“I want to see the big picture rather than a snippet here, a snippet there,” Pettyjohn said. “I was trying to quell some of the rumors and then – boom – the state forestry division put it out on Facebook and I was not very happy to see that.”

While the specifics are still being worked out, reducing crop damage from deer is at the heart of the proposed pilot program, Hofmann said.

“It really goes to the point that we’re trying to address deer management and the excessive population of deer in southern Delaware,” she said. “This is just one tool to look at helping to manage that population.”

Deer cause anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 in estimated damages annually on most farms throughout the state as the herbivores munch on acre upon acre of valuable crops from corn and soybeans to pumpkins and watermelons, said Delaware Farm Bureau Executive Director Pam Bakerian.

Crop damage has been getting worse, she said, and now the Farm Bureau is working with government officials to see if there’s any way to curb those losses.

But hunters like Pusey worry that if the pilot program is successful, it will pave the way for more public lands to go into private hands. Currently, hunters have access to about 80,000 acres of state forests, parks and wildlife areas – including the Tunnell and Long tracts in Redden – for hunting. They have to pay for annual hunting licenses, which recently increased from $25 to $39.50 for Delaware residents and from $130 to $199.50 for out-of-state hunters, as well as a $32.50 annual conservation pass for their vehicles.

Hofmann said the two tracts make up about 1.3 percent of the total huntable acres in the state.

“If this is successful and Delaware makes money on it, then they’re going to take another tract, and another tract, until the regular person in Delaware doesn’t have anywhere to hunt,” Pusey said. “There’s no way that the everyday, regular hunting guy is going to have any means of leasing this. Not at all.”

But qualifying whether there really is an overpopulation problem depends on who you ask, said wildlife biologist Jake Bowman, who chairs the University of Delaware’s wildlife ecology program.

“If I was to walk in a room with a bunch of hunters, they’d say no,” Bowman said. “If I walk into a room with a bunch of soybean farmers, they’d say yes.”

From an ecological perspective, which Bowman said is much more difficult to measure because it considers impacts on everything from native vegetation to bird communities, most areas of the state do not have a problem with too many deer.

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But the issue is highly localized, he said.

“In northern New Castle County, there are way too many deer in some of those areas, like White Clay,” Bowman said. “Some areas in Sussex have an awful lot. It all goes back to whether we’re effectively using hunting to control those numbers.”

The most recent data on deer populations in the First State is several years old, but found hunters harvest about one-third of the state’s deer. A study published in 2014 estimated nearly 40,000 deer wander Delaware’s forests and fields, which marked a 28-percent decline from the 2005 population estimate.

Hunters killed more than 14,000 deer, a record number, during the 2016-2017 hunting season.

The perception that deer overpopulation is posing such a strain on the state’s agriculture prompted Gov. John Carney to include the issue in his first State of the State speech on Jan. 18. Hofman said the controversial pilot program is just one of the management options under review by Carney’s administration.

While Hofmann noted a deer problem in southern Delaware as a driving force behind the newly proposed program, Sussex County farmers are not the only ones struggling to cope with the losses from a booming deer population.

Stewart Ramsey, who tends to about 350 acres that straddle Wilmington and Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, has a front-line view of the havoc an uncontrolled deer population can wreak on family farmers.

“They’re a horrible problem,” said Ramsey, who also is president of the New Castle County Farm Bureau. “Last year deer damage cost us around $45,000 – that’s from pumpkins, lost hay, corn, all crops basically. And it’s gotten incrementally worse each year, so it’s hard to plan for that.”

A few decades ago, the Ramsey family sold their farmland to a conservation group, but continued to lease and work the land. A few years ago, it became part of the 1,100-acre First State National Park, meaning that hunting to manage deer populations is not an option.

“They stopped the hunts and now we’re watching the deer population step up,” the 54-year-old farmer said. “We will always have some deer damage, and some is acceptable. But where we are now it’s so acute that it kind of slaps you in the face. It jeopardizes our existence and ability to survive.”

While Ramsey is a proponent of enhancing deer management efforts, he was skeptical about the proposed lease option. He had his own alternatives – such as a possible bounty on doe hunting, lowering hunting license fees and other hunting-related incentives.

“Our problem is we’re not killing enough deer,” he said. “And [the leases in Redden State Forest are] not going to fix my problem. At best, somehow I’m wrong and their experiment will prove to be wildly successful.”

Contact reporter Maddy Lauria at (302) 345-0608, mlauria@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @MaddyinMilford.