"Jennifer" wrote in message
oups.com...
Just whining... planted my first-ever vegetable garden this year, and
it's been doing really well, but earlier this summer, I came out to
find the tops of my bush beans munched off and a big deer hoofprint in
the soil. I strung up that black deer netting 4 feet high around the
beds, my beans recovered, and all was well for a few months.

The problem is that there are too many deer in the area to support the
population that has grown without predation. We no longer have either the
big bad wolves or pumas in the South that keep their population in check.
Under these overpopulation circumstances, deer have become the predators on
our shrubs and gardens. Another problem is that people feed the miserable
things, when the normal cycle of nature would cause many of them to starve
to death when the environment is no longer able to support their population.

Northern MN, my original home, had a reasonable balance. We had a number of
pack of timber wolves in the area that made Bambi their main food source,
and about every four or five years we had a severe enough winter to starve
many of the weaker and older deer plus all the previous spring's fawns. This
was also a time when the wolves found the deer easy pickings. Nature is good
when left to do its thing.

Before anyone says that deer were here before many people, this is something
to consider. There are far more deer in the area now than before man
arrived. They thrive in cut over and agricultural land. Controlling the
excess should be the goal of the DNR, but they protect the miserable things,
and Bambi huggers shriek whenever an organized hunt takes place in an urban
area even if every shrub and garden is decimated.

Not a deer lover....

JPS