Hartford Advocate: News – The Quiet Kill

WhiteTail Solutions thins the herd in the suburbs without waking up the neighborhood

By Nick Keppler

Four deer were lazily hanging out in Joe Tucker’s yard, right along his driveway. They did not gallop away when I pulled in. “That’s part of the problem,” Tucker’s buddy Dan Beyer told me later. “They’ve lost their fear of man as a predator.”

This is why WhiteTail Solutions exists. The company considers its employees “deer management consultants,” and use bows and arrows to hunt their prey.

And this is why the company is most active in the affluent suburbs, areas the state Department of Environmental Protection has deemed troublesome for their abundance of deer and lack of hunters. Ninety-nine percent of their hunts, says Tucker, who co-owns the company with his brother Chris and Beyer, occur in Fairfield County.

Man isn’t much of a predator here. Deer hunting “is not a way of life” along the Gold Coast, says Patricia Sesto, chair of the Fairfield County Municipal Deer Management Alliance and director of Environmental Affairs for the Town of Wilton. “People haven’t grown up with it and aren’t educated about it. … It’s just not our pastime.”

Land here has been developed in a way — golf courses and wetlands separating office parks — that leaves open space where deer can eat well and breed plentifully, says Howard Kilpatrick, the DEP’s biologist in charge of deer management.

When the deer population increases, so do Lyme disease, car collisions and ecological damage.

The number of deer per square mile reaches 60 in some parts of Connecticut, says Kilpatrick. While he says it’s difficult to say how many are “too many” for this type of terrain, his educated guess is closer to 10 per square mile.

So, there’s WhiteTail Solutions, a company headed by 40-year-old commercial well-driller Joe Tucker, who runs WhiteTail Solutions from his Oxford home. Click link below for full story!

via Hartford Advocate: News – The Quiet Kill.