With no deer hunt, Utah herds would perish

From the bench, a few weeks past, Leslie Lewis, 3rd District judge in Utah, asked a deer hunter standing before her: "Have you ever actually looked at a deer when they're alive?"

She prefaced her question by noting she had a prejudice against deer hunters. She then had a spectator in the gallery arrested, handcuffed and jailed, because he yawned when he should have smiled at her anti-hunting views.

I ask her: "Have you ever looked into the eyes of a starving deer?"

I have. It is, to this day, a haunting memory. In the center of a group of trees were five deer so weak from hunger they couldn't stand, but only stare, wide-eyed, frightened and caught in the agonizing, painful grip of certain death by starvation.

Nearby, we counted 35 carcasses of deer that had starved in a 100-square-yard area and many more outside the area.

I doubt Lewis, who was voted out Tuesday, has or ever will see the end results of having too many deer and too little food. Doubt she has ever given much thought to deer trying to survive a winter with limited food sources.

The problem is simple enough to understand. There are, here in Utah, huge areas of summer range, but very limited areas of winter range. Winter range being land at lower elevations where snow doesn't bury food sources. Deer numbers increase in the summer, when food is plentiful, but deer struggle to survive in the winter when food is limited. Every winter wildlife biologists find deer that have starved.

The problem is one Lewis helped create. She, like thousands of others, have built homes, roads and shopping centers on land that was once critical deer winter range. Guilty as charged. In her defense, it probably never crossed her mind.

In the winter of 1992-93, thousands of deer starved during a particularly harsh winter. The herds have never recovered.

It's a delicate balancing act, that is, trying to figure out just how many deer available winter range can support, with no hard and fast formula. Deer have been lucky in recent years, because winters have been relatively mild. Wildlife biologists fear a bad winter on top of poor range conditions could result in heavy losses.