Home-wreckers

Deer are not substitutes for our extinct avian plant-eaters - and their impact on the forest floor is devastating.

- Andrea Graves

Barry Crump was no scientist, but he was a spinner of great yarns and knew why deer were culled. In A Good undergrowth Keen Man, he wrote, "Once, it had been difficult to climb through dense on the ridges, but a few generations of deer, eating the young trees before they were more than a few inches high, browsing on the undergrowth, and chewing at the bark quite high on some of the smaller trees, had altered that ... You could stand almost anywhere in this forest and see at least 100 yards through trees, completely unsupported by undergrowth or saplings."

Crumpy wrote that possums, pigs and goats contributed to the denuding-and, 64 years later, little has changed. Prominent ecologists wrote with thinly disguised despair in the New Zealand Journal of Ecology in February that the Department of Conservation's Predator Free 2050 focus ignores the devastating hollowing-out of forests by large, ground-dwelling herbivores.

The government-funded deer hunting immortalised by Crump ended in the 1980s, when commercial hunting from helicopters controlled deer. Heli-hunting has since dwindled, and the only deer control across most of the country is now recreational hunting.