The city of Montreal quietly undertook its promised cull of 131 deer in two east-end nature parks over nine days last fall, a spokesperson for the city has confirmed.
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The frozen deer meat will be distributed among Montreal-area food banks, city spokesperson Camille Bégin told The Gazette.
The cull, announced last spring at a news conference by executive committee member Laurence Lavigne Lalonde, was carried out between Oct. 28 and Nov. 5 by a single professional sharpshooter using a rifle equipped with a silencer. The shooter took down 112 deer in the Pointe-aux-Prairies Nature Park and another 19 in the Anjou nature park.
Both parks were closed during the operation, and area residents had been warned to stay away via notices delivered to their doors and posters at the parks’ entrances.
“The city received no complaints about the operations, and thanks the population, its own teams and its partners for their collaboration for the smooth running of the operations,” Bégin said.
The operation was carried out in accordance with a permit issued by the provincial environment department. That permit specifies the maximum number of deer authorized per kilometre in these urban parks, given that their selective grazing over time damages the underbrush to the point where the ecosystem cannot regenerate. The deer are then deprived of food and tend to wander into neighbouring yards and gardens, crossing roads and often causing accidents.
At a news conference last June, Lavigne Lalonde explained that the population of white-tailed deer in the Pointe-aux-Prairies and Anjou nature parks had surged from 65 to 165 since 2021. Experts estimate these parks can accommodate only about a half-dozen deer per square kilometre and still maintain their native plants, tree canopy and other animal and bird species.
The Pointe-aux-Prairies Nature Park in the east-end borough of Rivière-des-Prairies—Pointe-aux-Trembles is a forest of about 2.6 square kilometres and harboured an estimated 140 deer before the cull. The Bois d’Anjou Nature Park, in the adjacent borough of Anjou, is about 1.7 square kilometres in area and had about 25 white-tailed deer.
With no predators in the area, the deer multiply quickly. Their selective and voracious grazing quickly deprives the forest of certain native plants, and then invasive species take over, disturbing a delicate balance required to preserve the ecosystem.
Montreal took years to study the problem before taking action. Efforts in other jurisdictions to tranquilize and then truck deer to other locations have ended with a large proportion of the deer dying during, or within a year following, transportation. Experiments with sterilizing deer continue, but this type of operation is expensive and takes time to produce results.
Montreal is not the only city dealing with an urban deer problem. The city of Longueuil had to fight a series of court battles to defend its right to reduce the deer population in Michel-Chartrand Park, a battle it finally won when a Superior Court judge confirmed that right in September 2023. Recently, that city announced the completion of its deer cull operations, during which the population of deer in the park was reduced by a total of 105 animals in two separate operations, one in late October and one in mid-December.
“Now that the control operation … has been completed, we are continuing our efforts to promote the restoration of the ecological balance of Michel-Chartrand Park,” Longueuil Mayor Catherine Fournier said in a news release.
The city will plant 600 trees and 10,000 native plants in the park this year to begin its regeneration.
Both cities are participating in a research project with the Quebec environment department called Parcs en Santé, which aims to find ways to keep deer populations under control, sustainably and humanely, into the future. One of the many objectives is to reduce the risk of disease transmitted by ticks. White-tailed deer are a known vector for ticks, which can cause lime disease in humans
Representatives of both cities acknowledged that future culls will probably be necessary as deer multiply quickly and have virtually no predators in these urban environments.
“Even if this is the end of the saga today, we have the responsibility to act in the long term to avoid reliving such a scenario in the future,“ Fournier said.
Asked if Montreal will hold another cull next fall, Bégin said: “The situation of the overpopulation of deer will be re-evaluated over the course of the year.”
She said the distribution of deer meat to food banks is being handled by an organization called Chausseurs généreux (Generous Hunters). That organization is based in the Lower Saint Lawrence region and since 2013 has been encouraging and helping hunters to donate a part of their game harvest to families in need.