Stepping out of the house one morning recently, I noticed that during the night a deer had browsed by and nipped off the tops of some beach plum and sumac saplings that I had grown from seed. The deer had to stretch its neck over a pot of salt shrub and around one of switch grass to get at what it wanted, and it ignored some marigolds and a pot of columbine set nearby.
Stories of hungry deer are a dime a dozen on the South Fork. Unless a yard or garden is fenced off, they will come and eat whatever they like and then some. The underside of trees is trimmed just past how high an average deer can stretch its neck. Downed limbs are almost instantly denuded of leaves, the deer able to get to foliage otherwise out of reach; think of Aesop’s “The Fox and the Grapes.”
It is worth remembering that not too long ago there was no view into the woods. A dense understory of shrubs, saplings, and briars blocked sight any more than a yard or two deep. Today with the understory mostly gone, the land’s contours are fully visible where they used to be a mystery. Passage below oaks and beeches is relatively easy now on the parklike forest floor.
It turns out that deer have a preference for native plants and will clear these out, allowing invasives to take over. In a recent publication, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation makes an analogy to livestock overgrazing a range. As my unintentional experiment suggests, deer are preventing seedlings of many species from growing into the next generation of trees and bushes.
In one example I saw, evidence suggests that the current deer population in eastern North America will result in the extinction of ginseng within the next hundred years. With the hollowing out of the native woodlands, sharp reductions in the abundance and diversity of songbirds have been observed. Eliminating the understory even reduces the forest’s ability to sequester carbon, exacerbating climate change.
Deer were at one time far less abundant. It is believed that hunting by Native Americans and natural predators kept their numbers in check. Then hunting with firearms and land clearing for firewood and farming reduced their population further. Now they are back in force.
I wonder about the beach plums and sumac and if as these age out they will be replaced in kind or if they will go the way of so many songbirds and the ginseng.