Too Many Deer, Too Many Earthworms with Dr. Bernd Blossey — WildFed Podcast #161

We've got a really important episode for you today. At least, important to us, and probably to you too if you’ve been listening to this show for a while. In fact, in some ways, it feels like it helps to make sense of a couple of important themes we’ve explored again and again here over the last 160 episodes. Most notably, those of wild game conservation — who funds it and where its efforts have been focused, as well as invasive species — and in particular, how significant the threat from them is, how we could or should be dealing with them, and what feedback loops we may be creating through our attempted conservation efforts.

The interview is with Dr. Bernd Blossey, who specializes in the intersection between whitetail deer and their high populations, invasive earthworms in North America, and invasive plant species and how the three of these factors intersect, overlap, and exacerbate the issues that each, individually, creates on the landscape.

Basically, it's like the title says. Too many deer, too many earthworms. Specifically, too many whitetail deer on our landscape, far more than can be sustainably supported by our ecosystems. And the invasion of earthworms beneath our feet in North America, most of which are not native here, since the last glaciation pushed all the worms back to the deep Southern United States. There were, after all, 2 miles of ice covering the land that now is home to now our northern forests. When those forests regrew, they did so in the absence of earthworms, and the worms that are here now are not just exotic but extremely deleterious to those forests and many of the native plant species that live there. These two factors — over-populated whitetail deer from above and exotic earthworms from below — might be influencing the spread of invasive plant species in ways that aren’t readily apparent to the untrained observer.

But Dr. Blossey — a professor who heads up the Ecology and Management of Invasive Plants Program at Cornell University — is going to pick that apart for us today, helping to make sense of the data. He’s also a hunter himself, so his view of conservation is informed from an inside perspective.

The conclusion we've walked away with is that a lot of what we’ve been calling conservation in the hunting community has really been about creating sufficient deer hunting opportunities. This makes sense since it’s been hunters footing the conservation bill over the years, but high deer numbers aren’t synonymous with healthy ecology, and we may have reached, and exceeded the ecological carrying capacity for whitetail deer in much of the country. This might be a welcomed problem were it not for the devastating consequences this is having on our flora, and in particular how it might contribute to the spread of deleterious exotic species. Like a lot of us, Dr. Blossey likes to hunt and eat whitetails, so he’s sympathetic to our desire to have ample opportunities, but after listening, one can’t help thinking we need a more holistic approach to conservation in North America. And one that, and we say this a little begrudgingly, brings more than just hunter's voices to the table.

After several years of actively exploring these issues, we feel that this conversation has been a missing piece of the puzzle. Certain things just weren’t adding up for us. It’s already changing the way we look at the landscape and our role as hunters.

We hope you find it as eye-opening as we have.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/161