Opponents stage protest as clock ticks down on B.C. island deer kill

Animal rights advocates and some residents of a small B.C. gulf island gathered Friday to protest a plan to clear the island of deer.

Residents of Sidney Island voted narrowly in February to support a Parks Canada plan to eradicate its entire deer population, which officials say has decimated the local ecosystem.

Sharon Glynn, an organizer of Friday’s protest told Global News the work is not needed, and that plans to kill deer from helicopters could be inhumane.

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“The Sidney Islanders have had very effective, localized, very safe hunting operations. They’ve reduced the deer from probably 2,500 to 100 or 200 today,” she said.

“So the question is why is Parks Canada embarking on this still, to the cost of almost $6 million.”

Glynn wants to see the operation paused while a scientific census of the deer and vegetation renewal is conducted.

Part-time Sidney Island resident Paul Lalonde acknowledged that deer had “shredded” the island in the past, but also argued islanders’ efforts had addressed the problem.

“We’ve had the numbers down at their lowest, judged basically by the hunting activities on the island and by the regrowth of our forests, where we are now having aspen groves growing back again, cedars growing up, arbutus trees actually growing again,” he said.

“So we are seeing the ecology recovering and now we are going to spend this money 10 years too late. If they had done this in 2008 even, when the deer numbers were at (their) peak, this would have been reasonable.”

Parks Canada, however, said opponents of the project don’t understand the science behind it.

“The real objective of this project is the long-term recovery of the forest ecosystem on Sidney Island which has been significantly damaged and degraded due to over-browsing from invasive European fallow deer,” Gulf Islands National Park Reserve Supt. Kate Humble told Global News.

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Humble said vegetation on the island has not shown positive signs of recovery, with few “teenager” trees or seedlings surviving the deer. The few trees that are surviving are mostly Grand Fir, she said, leaving the island facing a vegetative monoculture and weak animal biodiversity.

European fallow deer,  unlike native black-tailed deer, are voracious and indiscriminate eaters, she added, and are known for wildly fluctuating populations.

“Every time the fallow deer population has been brought down in number, it has rebounded a few years later,” she said.

“What project partners are doing now is an eradication. The total elimination of a population into the future so we don’t have to do the work over and over and over again.”

Humble acknowledged that the eradication will also mean removing the small number of native black-tailed deer on the island, but said that species is known to swim between the Southern Gulf Islands and is expected to repopulate Sidney Island in the coming years, without competition from the fallow deer.

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Staff with the BC SPCA will be on hand for animal wellness oversight, she said, and residents will have their own safety coordinators who communicate with Parks Canada to ensure there is no risk to the public while the operation takes place.

The plan has also secured the backing of the W̱SÁNEĆ Leadership Council, the Tsawout and Pauquachin First Nations.

W̱SÁNEĆ Leadership Council community engagement coordinator Eric Pelkey said his people were initially hesitant about the plan until they learned more about it.

“Once we demonstrated to our people the devastation the fallow deer have wrought on Sidney island, a lot of the people understood and approved of the way that we were proposing to go with the full eradication,” he said.

“They eat everything. Everything and anything. They have eaten all the edible plants and berries, even small trees.”

He added that the aerial aspect of the kill was necessary because the island’s deer population has grown quite accustomed to humans, and become adept at hiding.

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Pelkey said local First Nations had been working with Parks Canada for several years and consulted extensively with local residents and surrounding First Nations.

“The fact is we need to deal with it,” he said. “We have made a plan and we are going to deal with it.”

Islanders like Lalonde remain unconvinced.

“Parks would do well to actually look at the situation on the ground today instead of the situation they remember from 15 years ago and ask themselves is this a reasonable spend of taxpayer money,” he said.

The eradication is scheduled to take place within a window from Nov. 25 to Dec. 15. Humble said the actual operation will take place on 10 days in that period, which will be communicated to residents in the days to come.