Spring in is the air.

That means deer, especially the whitetail variety, are on public and private property, foraging for food.

In the March 25 Eagle, staff writer Samantha Beal documented an Adams Township couple who approached the supervisors for help with a deer problem.

Marcia Semper told township officials her property is overrun with deer.

“We have a family of deer who live in our backyard daily, and use it as their grazing pasture,” Semper said. “They have eaten our trees, shrubs and flowers.”

If you read more, you will find that resident Tina Wilson said she actually enjoys seeing deer in her yard, to the extent she sometimes feeds them.

“I feel for these people,” Wilson said. “But quite honestly, I dearly love the wildlife that we have.”

Wilson said she sometimes has as many as 20 deer in her yard, including three bucks.

She said wildlife is part of the reason why people move to the township.

“That’s why we live in rural Adams Township,” Wilson said.

What residents have to understand is that if you feed the deer, there are going to be a lot more of them around. Food supply directly determines deer population. And homeowners have lost landscape plants to foraging deer.

According to the Pennsylvania Game Commission, “while feeding deer may enhance wildlife viewing, decades of research has clearly shown that supplemental feeding leads to increased disease risk, long-term habitat destruction, increased vehicle collisions, habituation to humans and alteration of other deer behavioral patterns and, ultimately, the demise of the value of deer and deer-related recreation.”

Read more at www.bit.ly/NoFeed.

The Penn State Deer Research Center, which provides research and educational opportunities for students and faculty, indicates you need at least an 8-foot-high fence to keep the deer out. They can jump very, very high.

The best thing to do is to make the deer feel like unwanted guests on your property. They hate electric fences. The charge doesn’t harm them, but detracts them from staying in the area. And deer can sometimes jump over an 8-foot barrier, so nonelectrified fences will need to be at least that high, Penn State noted.

Read more from Penn State’s work on fencing at www.bit.ly/DeerFence.

What else can a homeowner do?

Not much, according to animal science professionals, other than if you want to instead harbor deer, and expand their population, feeding them certainly works.

So don’t feed the deer; unless, of course, you want lots more of them around.

— AA