What We Can Do

Imagine a forest full of flowers. Young saplings reaching up to the sky. Deer roam through a thriving understory of native plants, lightly grazing. Families walk along a trail, enjoying life outdoors. A creek cascades through the rocks, clean and babbling. Hundreds of different birdsongs carry on the breeze. This is an ecosystem in balance. This is a future within reach—if we work together with nature.

As The Wild Trust, here’s what we’re doing to address the deer overpopulation crisis and rebalance our ecosystems:

education

Sharing clear, ethical, and practical guidance—backed by science—for individuals and communities facing the deer overpopulation crisis in both rural and suburban areas.

Community RESOURCES

Helping concerned citizens and communities identify and manage the impacts of
deer overpopulation.

Wild Trust Network

Building a broad coalition that is ready to take action to rebalance our ecosystems.

Effective Solutions

Addressing the deer overpopulation crisis is going to require a toolbox of solutions.

Building deer exclosures (fences that keep deer out) can be effective for helping areas like gardens, forest restoration sites, and rare habitats to regrow. But they’re an expensive, small-scale solution—and one that introduces more synthetic material like metal fencing and plastic into the ecosystem.

Legislative and regulatory changes that address the deer overpopulation crisis are necessary. But this process takes time—and forest collapse is happening right now. We can't wait.

Currently, the most effective way to control the deer population is by hunting and harvesting antlerless deer (like does) on a large scale. It’s the best tool we have right now to address the deer overpopulation crisis, improve human safety, restore forest health, and rebalance our ecosystems.

Ineffective Solutions

Over the years, there have been many solutions proposed and implemented to reduce deer populations. Unfortunately, many of them have been impractical, ineffective, or both.

Surgical sterilization of deer is extremely expensive, and birth control requires darting the same deer every year—a nearly impossible task. Fertility controls
like these have limited success in small, isolated populations, but are not effective
at scale.

While we should allow wolves and mountain lions to return to New York state naturally, any large-scale reintroduction poses significant social, political, and ecological challenges—limiting the ability of these apex predators to make a significant impact on deer populations.

Current recreational hunting that primarily targets bucks and other mature male deer isn’t enough to address the deer population crisis. Antlered deer alone simply don’t have a significant effect on deer population growth.