Are they going to be able to free range, the way we commonly see whitetail deer roaming around the county?
Bloody locals, pissing around as though they own the place. Let's blast them to Kingdom Come ... hmmm tree huggers and kumbaya.
You've actually seen wildlife? Soz!
They’re lacking their natural predators — and the logical solution of introducing them is ruled out because the local forest preserves aren’t large enough to support wolf packs.
Maybe the coyotes will figure out how to take them down.
Aren’t those from cannibalism?
An environment is whatever it is at a point in time. You have described how things are around you and that is the current normal. You may not like it or even understand it but that is how it is.
You have to decide whether deer should live within your domain or not. At the moment it sounds like they are a negative factor for you. When you have run out of deer, will you start on the coyotes? When you have run out of creatures with backbones, will you start on arthropodia or amphibians?
Deer eat grass, they can thrive almost anywhere in North America just fine with or without people feeding them.
In suburbs they probably need to capture and slaughter some number of them to keep the numbers reasonable.
https://www.msudeer.msstate.edu/deer-diet.php
"Although low quality forages such as mature grasses provide adequate nutrition to animals such as elk and cattle, the quicker digestive process of whitetails requires more readily digestible forages to fulfill their energy and protein requirements. On severely overpopulated and depleted ranges, white-tailed deer have starved to death with their stomachs full of low quality forages."
Other than that, I know Steven Rinella listed a few pure herds in his (excellent) book [2] on the American Buffalo, but I'd have to dig it out to find them for you.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzyMrBUys90
[2] https://www.amazon.com/American-Buffalo-Search-Lost-Icon/dp/...
ETA: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/wind-cave-bison-genetics.ht...
"Wind Cave and Yellowstone National Parks are the only two federal herds to have population sizes large enough for sufficient testing. Both herds show no evidence of cattle introgression."
So there are at least two
I grew up in Kane County, in the 90s it was the edge of the suburban-rural interface of Chicagoland (used to be the last commuter rail stop from the city).
Random fun tidbit is the WW1 code-breaking[0] that took place there as well, which today remains an acoustics lab[1].
[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20220521185943/https://northwest...
I highly recommend a visit if you’re ever in the area.
Anyway it would be really interesting to be able to chart the changes to this microcosm of a prairie ecosystem over thousands of years if there were no human intervention whatsoever.
https://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/youngstock-management/pros-c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_vigilante_violence_in_Indi...
I wonder how climate change is going to affect the idealistic "restore the ecosystem" plan.
Id personally put that money into fighting the Pine Beatles which at this moment are killing huge swathes of existing wildlife and ecosystems. But that’s hard laborious work.
pfdietz•1mo ago
Kane Country has had cougars for quite a while. :)
pushcx•1mo ago
sanex•1mo ago
pfdietz•1mo ago
mbreese•1mo ago
More on the bison at Fermi: https://www.fnal.gov/pub/about/bisoncam/