When animals encroach

When Mark Di- Luigi’s cell phone rang on the first day of his summer vacation last year, the Virginia game warden knew he would have to put on his uniform one more time before he could go fishing.

“There’s a bear in downtown Leesburg,” his boss said. “The police called, looking for you.”

Mr. DiLuigi arrived in Leesburg — the seat of Loudoun County, the fastest-growing county in the United States — to find about 20 police officers, dozens of residents, news helicopters whirring overheard and reporters “everywhere,” converging to see a 150-pound black bear perched in a sycamore tree.

“He was as happy as could be, eating leaves,” Mr. DiLuigi recalled.

This was not the first time in Mr. DiLuigi’s nine-year career that he had seen a bear in a suburban neighborhood. In fact, he said, the number has increased over the past three years.

“There are bear here,” he said. “I will tell you, there are bear here.”

Bears, deer, raccoons , foxes — even coyotes — are highly adaptable and flourish in urban environments, said Maryland official Paul Peditto, debunking the myth that most animals avoid suburbia and cities.

“People once thought that deer needed big woods and fields, but they are doing pretty well in their new landscape,” said Mr. Peditto, director of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ Wildlife and Heritage Foundation.

The problem, said Mr. Peditto and other authorities, is that animals are moving into communities built near woods and with gardens and shrubbery that provide ample food and shelter for them to live and multiply. As a result, the animals are spreading diseases, causing millions of dollars worth of property damage, eating pets and, in extreme cases, killing people.

Even coyotes, native to Western states, now live in every Maryland and Virginia county and have made dogs and cats a part of their regular diet. Virginia officials are so concerned that they spent about $177,000 in 2003 to control the population.

Raccoons and foxes are spreading rabies among other animals, and deer are the primary carriers of the deer tick, which is responsible for Lyme disease.

A recent report by Maryland environmental officials states that large animal populations have become a “reservoir” for diseases, parasites and maladies, such as rabies, giardias and distemper.

In March 2003, a 25-year-old Northern Virginia man became the first human to die of rabies in the state in five years. The strain of rabies that killed him was directly linked to a raccoon, authorities said. And the state has reported 133 new cases of rabies in animals since January.

Deer alone cause an estimated $18 million in property damage each year just in the D.C. metropolitan area. In Maryland, bears cause an estimated $15,000 to $20,000 worth of damage each year to farms.

“When people come into the area, they do not have a deer problem. They like seeing them,” said Doug Hotton, a deer specialist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. “Then [the deer] start eating plants and become a nuisance.”

At the National Arboretum in Northeast, about 30 whitetail deer caused thousands of dollars in damage last year. The problem had become so bad over the past 10 years that officials held a controlled hunt in March. About 15 deer were killed.

Arboretum officials said the damage goes beyond the financial cost: Some plants inside the 446-acre park began as delicate cross-breeding projects that took 10 to 15 years to cultivate.

“It is hard to assign a dollar amount to the damage,” said Margate Pooler, a research geneticist for the arboretum. “Most of the plants are rare and unique. It is like trying to put a dollar amount on a Picasso.”

She also said many of the damaged plants recovered after the hunt.

Safety first

Mr. DiLuigi said his first concern with the bear in Leesburg was the safety of the residents.

Bears are rarely dangerous, except when people try to feed or pet them, but Mr. DiLuigi knew one trapped in suburbia could be trouble.

His first move was to borrow an air rifle from animal-control officials and load it with three tranquilizer darts.

Mr. DiLuigi’s first dart hit the bear square in the buttock but did little more than scare it farther up the tree. The second one, fired about 40 minutes later, had no effect, either. But the third — another bull’s-eye to the rump — sent the bear running into the neighborhood.

The posse then assembled and chased the animal through the back yards of neighbors.

Some police officers blocked streets with their cruisers while others restrained curious onlookers — including children who joined the case on their bicycles.

“This bear was hurdling chain-link fences,” Mr. DiLuigi said. “He was climbing wooden fences, running in back yards. Big dogs were seeing this bear, tucking their tails between their legs and running the other way.”

He trailed the bear while using one hand to call state biologist Dan Lovelace and the other to monitor a police scanner.

Mr. Lovelace arrived about two hours into the drama, when the sun was setting, and the bear was again cornered. But he quickly ended the ordeal by bringing darts loaded with the more-potent sedative ketamine.

The drug quickly put the bear to sleep.

Authorities took DNA samples, tagged and tattooed the bear, then drove about two hours to release it into the wilderness.

“We don’t like to disclose where we took him,” Mr. DiLuigi said. “If we say we took him from this county to that county, someone there might say, ’We got enough problems.’ ” PHOTO2

Looking for solutions

The increased number of animals in suburbia and the problems they bring have sent residents and biologists looking for solutions. One remedy is the basic, organic approach.

For example, some homeowners are spraying chili pepper or garlic solutions on gardens to keep deer from eating plants.

But when an animal population grows beyond a few annoying deer nibbling at plants, authorities take a more active approach.

They occasionally shoot female deer with contraceptive darts and use electronic devices that keep deer off highways. When herds need to be significantly reduced, authorities relax hunting and trapping restrictions.

Still, biologists say the best solutions are the common-sense practices of bringing trash and pets inside and not using bird feeders because they attract dangerous animals.

“A lot of problems are created by people who don’t know better,” Mr. Peditto said. “They leave out their greasy, juicy barbecue set after using the grill. Bear and raccoons have an acute sense of smell. They will find that.”

This emerging, uneasy relationship between man and animals has created a philosophical dilemma for officials who must make the choice between protecting either landscape or wildlife.

Arboretum officials said they resorted to the hunt only after failed efforts to set traps and wrap trees with foil.

“It is an unhappy thing to do, but we had to do something before the populations became worse,” Ms. Pooler said.

Fairfax County scheduled up to nine controlled deer hunts in fall 2003 and extended its deer-hunting season by nearly three months.

Maryland allowed hunters last year to kill deer on private land on two Sundays in November in certain counties.

A Virginia resident staged his own hunt.

Irv and Jan Auerbach of McLean hired a contractor to bow hunt on their 31/2-acre lot. The move rankled neighbors, but it was legal. In fact, some wildlife officials recommend such action.

Virginia and Maryland officials are also taking steps to eliminate the coyote population in the region.

With help from the U.S. Agriculture Department, Virginia has created the Virginia Cooperative Coyote Damage Control program, whose professional hunters killed 394 coyotes in 2002 in the state.

This fall, Maryland will hold its first controlled bear hunt in more than 50 years, despite criticism from animal-rights activists.

In response, Mr. Peditto said the state has no intention of extinguishing Maryland’s bear population. Unlike coyotes, black bears are native to the area, and state environmental officials have taken credit for saving the bears while they were endangered during the past 30 years.

Despite all the efforts, biologists concede that animal populations continue to increase and that they have no foolproof plan.

“If there was a solution to this, I would be talking to you from my retirement home in Bermuda,” Mr. Hotton said. “We have to deal with animals on their terms.”

However, a recent paper in the May 28 edition of Science magazine called for a new approach to how people think about conserving wildlife.

Lead author Margaret Palmer, a University of Maryland biology professor, and others state that building communities attracts animals instead of sending them deeper into the woods or into extinction.

“The reason this is happening is because [these animals] love edge habitations,” such as those created by urban sprawl, she said. “Traditional ecology has focused on nature without humans and viewed humans as only destroying or damaging nature. We cannot save nature just to save nature any more.”

Miss Palmer and the other authors say preservationists should start accepting humans as part of wildlife.

They also say animal populations should be reduced through controlled hunts because not managing them is mismanaging the environment.

Miss Palmer acknowledges that the plan will be “music to some folks’ ears and blasphemy to others,” but says “the human population is here to stay, so science has to be more pragmatic.”