New Yprk Times article

Deer Roam, but Hunters May Not Tread
Michael Wernick for The New York TimesTWO CULTURES
Anthony Bacchi posts "No Hunting" signs on his property. Trophies, inset, at the Southside Rod & Gun Club.


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By DENNY LEE
Published: December 16, 2005
FOR 60 years, Edna Calkin has prowled the woods around Lake Huntington in the Catskills. She looks for fresh antler rubs on tree bark. She listens for rustling leaves. And when she finds a prime spot, as she did on one Saturday recently, she stands ramrod straight like a war statute, her rifle at the ready.

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The Catskills

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Michael Wernick for The New York Times
CRAMPED Edna Calkin says newcomers to the Catskills are keeping longtime hunters off private land.
"Be very still," Ms. Calkin said, cocking her weapon. "They can see the slightest movement."

It wasn't clear if she was referring to the white-tailed deer or the homeowners living nearby.

Hunting in the Catskills once meant untrammeled land, quiet stakeouts and enough meat in the freezer to last the winter. But these days, it is the hunters themselves who feel under the gun, as they are evicted from their stomping grounds by more and more second-home owners.

"Our land is being gobbled up by folks from the city," Ms. Calkin said, eyeing a partly built house at the edge of the woods. She heads the Red Fox Hunting Club, a loosely organized group of hunters, mostly from Cochecton, N.Y., a rural town about 120 miles north of New York City. "Once they arrive, the first thing they do is put up 'No Trespassing' signs."

Hunters shouldn't take it personally, the homeowners say.

"We don't want people shooting Bambi on our property," said Jeffrey Rubin, 52, a psychologist from Manhattan, echoing a common refrain among weekenders. His timber-frame house in Cochecton sits on 120 acres of wooded hillside that was once a favored spot among hunters. Now, it's barricaded behind a steel gate.

"Part of what drew us here is the wildlife," added Mr. Rubin, who bought the place five years ago with his partner, David Skovron, 50, an events planner. "Every night we see deer, bears, turkeys and coyotes. It's like living on the Serengeti."

As deer hunting season draws to a close next week, the culture clash of locals who love to hunt and weekenders who don't like the gunfire is rippling through the Catskills, pitting neighbor against neighbor and exposing class tensions in the gentrifying region.

On one side are the locals like Ms. Calkin, a retired secretary who lives in a trailer furnished with moose heads and grew up with a rifle in her hand. On the other are the city slickers, who live in lovingly restored country homes and probably never lifted a pistol.

The former grew up in the Catskills and regard hunting as a way of life. The latter flocked here since the late 1990's for a taste of country life on the weekends. Although they share the same dirt roads and post office, the second-home owners depart from rural tradition by curtailing hunting on their land.

"We're losing our habitat at a rapid pace," said Jack Danchak, 64, president of the Sullivan County Sportsmen's Federation, which represents 100 hunting clubs with a total of about 13,000 members. "The writing is on the wall for hunting to disappear. We're a dying breed."

To appreciate how ingrained hunting is to the Catskills, one only needs to look at a map. Scattered across the region are names like Hunter Lake, Hunter Pond, Hunter Mountain, the Town of Hunter and Deer Lake.

Until recently, schools were officially closed on the first day of hunting season, traditionally a Monday, so that fathers could take their sons (and some daughters) in pursuit of their first kill. "You did the same as your father and grandfather," said Mr. Danchak, who once owned a hunting and fishing store just north of Lake Huntington in Fosterdale. "As soon as you were old enough to hold a gun at 16, you went hunting."

Rural roads would be jammed with pickup trucks fitted with gun racks. Rifle blasts would echo across the snowy hills from dusk to dawn. And "Welcome Hunters" signs would flutter like parade confetti from gas stations, roadside motels and mailboxes. For three weeks starting in late-November, hunters ruled the land and never had to worry about trespassing, upsetting neighbors or being criticized for killing a deer.

To them, the Catskills are beginning to feel like a gated community. Hunters say they are lucky to find a place to stand, let alone anything to shoot.

Published: December 16, 2005
(Page 2 of 2)



Although hunting is permitted in the Catskill Forest Preserve, more than 90 percent of hunters in the Catskills - an area encompassing most of rural Delaware, Greene, Sullivan and Ulster Counties - use private lands, too, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. That is partly to avoid crowds. Veteran hunters also say that bucks are thought to favor the private areas because there is more edible undergrowth. (Regular big game licenses only allow the killing of a buck with an antler three inches or longer.)

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But the farmlands that once provided hunters with a bounty of open terrain have vanished as have the farmers who readily gave them permission to stalk game on their property. Large parcels of wooded areas have been cleared by developers, and the younger generations of many old hunting families have taken up the city or suburban life. Outfits like the Southside Rod & Gun Club in West Hurley, N.Y., once leased 3,000 acres for hunting in the Catskills; now, it's down to less than several hundred.

Among young people, Winchester Model 70's are being replaced by Xbox 360's. The number of deer licenses in New York has fallen to its lowest level in some 30 years, to 543,140 this year from a high of 803,475 in 1984. So few youngsters have picked up the sport that opening day was moved this year to a Saturday to encourage more participation.

Rural mores have also changed. In Cocheton early this month, spandex-clad joggers and dog walkers seem to outnumber hunters in orange vests and camouflage. And there was only one "Welcome Hunters" sign hanging in town (from a local pub), standing out like a lone protester against the thousands of signs that lined nearby roads like billboards and declared hunting "Strictly Forbidden."

"We used to hunt all of this," Ms. Calkin said dolefully during a driving tour of the area. "Now, it's inundated with city folks. I've written to a dozen of them, asking whether we can hunt on their land. They won't even reply."

And when a reply does come, it's not usually with a smile.

"Let's just say, they don't invite you in for coffee," said Karl Brueckner, 59, a member of Southside Rod & Gun, who has gone door-to-door asking second-home owners for permission to hunt. "They don't understand that hunting is a way of life up here."

That includes the new owner of the 120 acres of land that borders Mr. Brueckner's club, which he had hunted on since the 1950's.

"I am not a hunter, have never been an advocate of guns and don't want people killing deer on my property," said Anthony Bacchi, 57, the club's new neighbor and a health care consultant from Lloyd Neck on Long Island. The estate he bought overlooks the Ashokan Reservoir and has a 5,000-square-foot house and two guest cottages. A suburbanite most of his life, Mr. Bacchi was less than thrilled about having strangers troll his backyard with loaded guns, especially because of concern for his dogs. "My Labradors are large," he said, "and could be mistaken for deer."

To keep hunters away, Mr. Bacchi partook in what has become a fall ritual among new homeowners: he tacked hundreds of "No Hunting" signs on his property last month. But that doesn't always work. "Just the other day," he said, "we saw lots of hunters' footprints in the snow."

With less land to hunt, trespassing seems to be on the rise, prompting some homeowners to take matters into their own hands. "We help patrol people's property," said Anne Muller, founder of the Committee to Abolish Sports Hunting, a group based in New Paltz that has appropriated a cherished inner-city tactic - the neighborhood crime watch. When that fails, security fences, surveillance Web cams and calls to the police sometimes follow.

"It started with a love for animals," Ms. Muller said. "But when we studied it more, we realized there is a great risk to the general population. People have woken up with bullet holes in their headboards."

Hunters say those accidents are greatly exaggerated. Besides, they add, hunters provide a valuable public service by helping to thin the state's deer population. More than 143,000 white-tailed deer, the only deer common to New York State, were "harvested" by rifle and shotgun statewide last year along with nearly 63,000 by bow and muzzleloader. The state's deer herd is estimated at 800,000 to a million.

That might sound like Bambicide to city dwellers, but the mountain folks note wryly that it doesn't always take long for that attitude to change.

"When people first come up here, they call them Bambi, but after five years, they call them rats," said Tom Freda, a real estate broker in Callicoon, N.Y. "After their gardens are eaten by deer, and after they hit them on the road, people realize there's a reason for this whole system."

That's usually when local hunters start getting social calls from their big-city neighbors.

"When we first arrived, we turned a bunch of hunters away," said Tom Donaghy, a playwright from Manhattan, who with friends shares 140 acres in Napanoch, N.Y., that was untended for 18 years. "There were carcasses and bones everywhere. It was like the killing fields. But then we had too many deer."

Flower beds were ravished, tomato vines were picked clean. "So the following year," Mr. Donaghy continued, "we made an agreement with our closest neighbor to hunt deer on our land. Now I'm concerned about the bears."

New York doesnt help much with getting the young to hunt. If you want to hook a young one for life on hunting help them take a whitetail deer. Problem in NY is they must be 16years old to hunt big game. By then they have a car a job and other interests. Small game can be hunted at 12 and it helps but IMHO it isnt gonna hook many kids hunting rabbits.
We need our kids to hunt to keep the sport alive.
Dean

This kind of thing isn't happening only in New York, it is happening everywhere. Unfortunately, hunters have not done a good job at promoting our sport or improving our image with the nonhunting public...the majority of the public just thinks of us as idiots dressed in orange running around the forest with guns.

It was the hunter-conservationist, that brought many of today's readily available game species back from the brink of annihilation.

Too bad some of us look and act like easy targets.

MG

It's all a moot point .There are no more deer here in the Catskills !! They kept giving out more and more doe permits so now there's nothing left .I didn't even bother , instead I went to PA. But here for example a club of 20 hunters , hunting for 5 days took ONE buck !!...I remember a tv interview of a man in Long Island .He was feeding deer which he knew was illegal.There were far too many deer which were eating his roses.He wanted fewer deer but was very anti-hunting. He demanded that the state give the deer contraceptives !!! Brain dead .

Same here in Northern Wis. I have lost thousands of acres of land I use to hunt to people who have no clue.

I call it lot envy they are so use to keeping people off their tiny little lot in the city the end up transfering the same view when the buy a 40 or 80.

quote:

Originally posted by tonto:
New York doesnt help much with getting the young to hunt. If you want to hook a young one for life on hunting help them take a whitetail deer. Problem in NY is they must be 16years old to hunt big game. By then they have a car a job and other interests. Small game can be hunted at 12 and it helps but IMHO it isnt gonna hook many kids hunting rabbits.
We need our kids to hunt to keep the sport alive.
Dean

Hunters need to get active and change the law.

Where I'm from there is a community that nieghbors some BLM and it is always good hunting. Anyhow the folks that live there were california transplants and at first they didn't like hunters wandering around so close to there homes shooting bambi on the BLM land. Well anyhow now they are begging hunters to shoot deer out there front yard cause these deer are eating there wives precious roses and other plants and also shitting on there lawns and eating there beautiful manicured lawns. It won't happen tommorrow but wait in about a year or two they will begging for hunter to hunt on there land. Especailly when the Bears start raiding the trash cans, deer eating all there plants and shitting on there front door step.

John