Citizens of Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville are fed up to see the hungry deer of the neighboring national park ransacking their land by devouring everything they can get their teeth into.
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“The apple trees are raided every year. They are even able to climb on their hind legs to eat the leaves and the apples in the tree, ”says Élie Tremblay, pointing to the two trees emptied of their fruit in front of his house, near Chemin de la Rabastalière.
Photo courtesy, Elie Tremblay
It has become common to see a deer or two wandering near houses in this town.
When he moved in four years ago, he saw a deer about once a month. Now it’s a herd of five or six a day.
He had to put up a fence to protect the garden behind his house, whose driveway had become a “deer highway” where the animals destroyed everything in their path before settling down to sleep.
The newspaper spoke to six area residents who are struggling to adapt their gardening habits to the proliferation of deer
Photo Pierre-Paul Poulin
The garden of Adam Mizera, another resident of the municipality, is ransacked by these beasts.
“I try to plant flowers that the deer won’t eat. Hostas, tulips, even roses, they eat them,” says Adam Mizera, for example.
So much so that at the Auclair nursery in Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville, the manager, Julie Blanchette, has noticed an increase in requests for plants that deer do not eat.
“People want to replace the plants they have destroyed,” explains the one who has worked at the nursery for 15 years. She advises plants with thorns to discourage deer, but with the overpopulation of Mont-Saint-Bruno park, the animals have become not very “looking”, according to her.
OVERCROWDING
Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville is experiencing a problem similar to that of the city of Longueuil, which will proceed by culling to reduce the herd of deer, in excess at Michel-Chartrand Park. Remember that in Longueuil, more than a hundred deer would be present in the park, a number that would be up 50% compared to last year, and this while the park’s ecosystem could only support about a dozen.
The President of the Mont-Saint-Bruno Foundation, Tanya Handa, explains that with 15.3 deer per square kilometer currently in the park, the density is three times higher than the capacity of the ecosystem, established at 5 deer per square kilometer.
“The forest and the vegetation have been massively degraded. The deer come out of the park because they have nothing to eat, ”underlines the professor at UQAM, a biologist by training.
The overabundance of white-tailed deer is common in urban areas where predators such as wolves and coyotes have been eliminated, says Martin-Hugues St-Laurent, professor of animal ecology at the University of Quebec at Rimouski.
“These deer are trying to survive. They are in poor physical condition and they go and get the food where it is,” he sums up.
For Martin-Hugues St-Laurent, Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville must follow Longueuil’s example and carry out felling, the least expensive solution to reduce density and prevent deer from feeding on private properties. .
A PLAN THAT IS AWAITING
The Society of Outdoor Establishments of Quebec (Sépaq) announced in February that it plans to cull 200 deer at Mont-Saint-Bruno and the Îles-de-Boucherville, a plan that Tanya Handa is eager to see materialize.
In this regard, the Crown corporation is stingy with details. “We cannot move forward at the present time on a timetable and an action plan”, one indicates by email.
The City of Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville refuses any request for an interview, arguing that the deer file is under provincial jurisdiction.