Shortly after dawn, two men carrying what look like automatic weapons head toward blinds in the yard of Enid Feinberg, northeast of Baltimore. The SUVs parked in Feinberg’s driveway are plastered with bumper stickers expressing outrage at the people who stalk deer in her subdivision, and a sign on the three-car garage warns hunters away. Feinberg has a running feud with a neighbor who bags deer, and she keeps careful watch, through closed-circuit television, on the 14 acres she and partner Lierra Lenhard own: The woods that spill over their property connect to land where the city allows bow hunters to cull; every fall, the two women find deer with arrows in their bodies and festering wounds. Once, Feinberg chased off a camouflage-clad bow hunter she spotted crawling along the fence that borders their backyard. “We’re defending our home,” she says.
Yet here, at Feinberg and Lenhard’s invitation, are Anthony DeNicola, sharpshooter for hire, and his assistant, Charles Evans, dressed in Carhartt and ready to take aim at the deer the women leave corn out for each morning: DeNicola, whose company, White Buffalo Inc., has culled more than 10,000 deer, collecting fees from communities like Greenwich, Conn., and Princeton, N.J. The two men tuck themselves away—DeNicola in a shed and Evans in a truck. Feinberg has put out apples to mask their scent. Volunteers inside the house feed them reports off six TV screens linked to professional grade cameras that can bring objects into focus from up to half a mile away.
Evans and DeNicola are not looking, as hunters often do, for bucks, and they are not using bullets or aiming for the head or heart. Hired for the weekend by the Maryland nonprofit Wildlife Rescue Inc. (of which Feinberg is president), they are searching for does without tags on their ears—ones who have not yet been sterilized. They will hit them in the rumps with radio-transmitter-equipped tranquilizer darts so the deer can be captured for surgery. It’s part of an experiment to reduce deer numbers humanely. Within an hour, Evans gets a doe who bolts off Feinberg’s property and runs through trees and fields before collapsing. Soon after, DeNicola gets two sisters who head down a power company right-of-way before falling in snow-frosted leaves that carpet the woods.
Wildlife Rescue volunteers go out in an all-terrain vehicle to pick up the deer on stretchers and transport them to Feinberg and Lenhard’s garage. There the three does—pregnant, as almost all healthy does are in February—have their ovaries removed in a procedure perfected by Wisconsin vet Steve Timm over the past six years with DeNicola, a Yale- and Purdue-educated wildlife biologist. Timm performs the surgeries beside Dr. Tamie Haskin of Wildlife Rescue, one of a half dozen vet volunteers he’s trained around the country (with their donated time, the cost of each operation drops from about $1,200 to less than $500). In 30 minutes—the animals’ blood circulation and breathing suffer when they’re on their backs for longer—Timm and Haskin slice into each abdomen, locate the fist-sized uterus, cut out the fingernail-sized ovaries on either side, cauterize the wounds, stitch up three layers of muscle, and close with a row of surgical staples.
http://www.humanesociety.org/news/magazines/2014/05-06/out-of-season-alternatives-to-deer-culls.html
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