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Dec. 6, 2000, 10:50AM
Texas town cuts deal to get rid of whitetails
By JAMES PINKERTON
Copyright 2000 Houston Chronicle
One thousand Hill Country deer have literally dodged the bullet, as Lakeway officials suspended plans to let silencer-equipped sharpshooters thin a growing herd living in the community northwest of Austin.
And the yuletide reprieve comes with an all-expenses-paid trip for the deer to ranches outside Monterrey in northern Mexico.
Wild deer graze in the yards of Lakeway, near Austin. Cement giant Cemex is paying to relocate 1,000 whitetails to ranchland in Mexico.
On Nov. 7, residents in the community on the shores of Lake Travis voted 51 percent to 49 percent to hire a team of expert sharpshooters to cull the burgeoning deer population. A city census put the population at 1,700 malnourished whitetails in the 5,000-acre town, a hungry herd that stripped the community of shrubs, flowers and garden vegetables.
Despite 700 deer killed last year in traffic collisions in town and relocation in the spring of 650 deer to East Texas, Lakeway remained awash in whitetails.
But now, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department officials say a Mexican cement conglomerate has agreed to pay to relocate 1,000 deer to a company ranch in the north Mexico state of Nuevo Leon. The deer will be used as seed stock to replenish Mexican ranches where cattle operations and unrestricted hunting have depleted native deer stocks.
"It's a win-win situation," said Lakeway Mayor Charles A. Edwards. "Not only will we be able to get rid of 1,000 deer we sorely need to, but they will be able to stock some ranches where I understand they are getting their habitat built up.
"It will be a good place to rear future generations of these deer."
Lakeway residents who favored humane relocation of the deer expressed cautious approval.
"I think the community is quite relieved," said Tom Griffiths, a Lakeway businessman who chaired the Stop the Shooting In Lakeway Committee.
"If you like the deer, this is a good solution," said Griffith, whose group is working to find ranches in Texas where other deer can be transported. "They don't have to die; there doesn't have to be shooting."
And Griffith said discussions with Texas Parks and Wildlife biologists have allayed concerns the nearly tame deer would be quickly dispatched once in Mexico.
"I've had several comments that these deer won't make it 10 minutes past the border and will end up as taco meat," said Bryan Richards, a state biologist who is helping Lakeway. "There's really no basis for those statements."
Richards said Cemex, also known as Cementos de Mexico, one of the world's largest cement manufacturers, has assembled 100,000 acres of its own ranchland and neighboring ranches in Nuevo Leon where it has worked since 1994 to establish whitetail populations.
The Lakeway deer would be the initial seed stock for future generations, said Richards, who noted the ranchers entered game-transfer agreements with Parks and Wildlife in early 1999.
Cemex has hired a San Antonio firm to begin trapping and transporting the 1,000 deer -- at $125 for each one that arrives alive -- to the border at Laredo later this month, Richards said.
But the biologist cautioned that trapping and transporting deer usually results in a 20 percent to 30 percent mortality rate in the months following relocation because of the stress of netting, handling and transporting.
Small explosive charges will be used to fling 60-by-60-foot nets on deer as they graze on bait corn, Richards said.
Lakeway officials say the Mexico transfer will save them more than $150,000, noting the plan to shoot deer in the community was more expensive than trapping and relocation.
The sharpshooters hired to cull the herd employ expensive night-vision optics, low-velocity ammunition and silencers. The deer must be field-dressed on the spot, placed in coolers for a trip to a meat-processing plant and then transported to a charity, Edwards said.
But the mayor said the Mexico transfer, while reducing the deer population by half, is not the end of the problem.
"It won't totally alleviate our problem, but it will go a long way toward it," Edwards said.
Richards, a Parks and Wildlife biologist who heads the department's trapping efforts, has recommended installation of a deer fence on the west side of Lakeway to discourage migration.
The growing development in the Hill Country, which is home to the densest population of deer in America, has caused similar problems in other small communities, Richards said.
"There are so many more of these new developments coming in, and probably the worst you can do is landscape, fertilize and water, thus providing unlimited forage" for deer, Richards said.
"And since it's a development, you prohibit the discharge of firearms and preclude the most effective control method, hunting," he said. "The results are very predictable. ... You have an absolute deer crisis."