STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- With hundreds of deer estimated to now live on Staten Island, the city's greenest borough is getting markedly wilder.
Joseph Pane, a principal fish and wildlife biologist with the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), said that although the local deer population is relatively small, deer are reproducing and may soon pose a great danger -- including Lyme disease and traffic accidents -- to Island residents.
"Long-term, the public has to start thinking about control methods because the population will grow," Pane said. "We're ahead of the problem, and the community should start talking about things that we can do to keep the numbers down."
The DEC released a report surveying deer on the Island in April 2008, which identified four areas most inhabited by deer, including the northwestern and southwestern regions of the borough.
"The current population should now be considered self-sustaining," the 2008 report said of the 24 deer counted by DEC observers that year.
But the report, Pane noted, is not without flaws.
"The whole problem with these surveys is [deer] are mobile animals. They move a lot. When someone reports a sighting, you're not quite sure if you've got multiple people reporting the same animal," he said.
Jennifer Greenfeld, deputy chief for forestry, horticulture and natural resources at the city Department of Parks and Recreation, helped conduct a "spotlight survey" in March.
"At that point we found 35 deer ... in eight distinct groups, but that is not at all representative of the entire Island," Ms. Greenfeld observed.
She said the best option for precise scientific assessment is an aerial survey using infrared technology.
"It's a detection based on the temperature difference between the animal and the surrounding environment," she said, calling the infrared survey "extremely precise about identifying deer. It's very high-resolution."
Ms. Greenfeld asserted that winter was the ideal time for conducting an aerial survey, which she estimated would cost $10,000. She said the likelihood of the survey's being completed this year is "moderate." Within the next three years, she guessed, it's "highly likely."
The Parks Department said an exact count of the deer population would allow authorities -- private contractors, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or city officials -- to respond more appropriately.
"You can narrow down the possibilities of control measures because you do something different if there are 38 deer versus 400," Ms. Greenfeld said.
She suggested that there is a host of ways the Island could respond to the increasing deer problem, including "trapping and releasing [deer] elsewhere, birth control, and culling" - putting deer down by means other than for sport.
Borough President James P. Molinaro said deer removal might be the most pragmatic solution when the population causes an unacceptable hazard to residents.
"The only way to control them is by trapping them and bringing them upstate someplace and letting them loose there," the borough president said.
Molinaro's Environmental Engineer, Nick Dmytryszyn, advocated preventive rather than reactionary measures.
"When do you deal with a problem like this? Before it escalates into a tragedy -- or after a tragedy has happened? It doesn't take much for a deer to run across the West Shore Expressway."
Controlling local deer is made especially challenging by the reality that the Island lacks the coyote and bear populations that prey on deer naturally, and because hunting, the unnatural option for control, is illegal in the five boroughs.
Despite that, the DEC made recommendations for the management of the burgeoning deer population in their 2008 survey, which Mr. Pane, the DEC biologist, said are "still relevant today."
The report suggested increased signage on highways and roads to warn drivers of potential deer crossings, new fencing along the West Shore Expressway to impede deer crossings, and abstention from feeding deer.
Mr. Pane said that the state DOT has posted signs and added fencing in accord with the report's recommendations.
Frank Murano, chair of Community Board 3 on the South Shore, said he, too, fears a growing population of deer on the Island.
"The first step ... is to ask people not to feed them," Murano said of the deer, which, he added, could become acclimated to human contact.
Murano noted the danger a robust population of wild deer could present to the Island: That some deer host ticks carrying Lyme disease, that deer can severely thwart regional plant growth, and that an increased presence of deer on roadways can lead to potentially fatal car accidents.
West Brighton resident Frank Crane, a teacher and administrator at Staten Island Academy, remembered seeing deer three times on the Island. He described one incident when he was driving near the school's Dongan Hills campus on Merrick Avenue and had to slam on his car brakes to avoid a collision.
"Out of the corner of my eye comes this streaking object; it was a buck, a deer with antlers ... and I hit the brakes. It shot in front of me. That scared me," Crane recalled.
The Advance reported about deer on the Island as early as October 1994, recalling sightings in the three previous years. The 1994 report called the notion that deer swam across the Arthur Kill from New Jersey "preposterous."
"Deer can swim, but the key question is why any deer would venture into the treacherous current and filthy waters of the kill just to get to Staten Island. Deer don't migrate unless they're forced to," the article said.
But in just under two decades, the paradigm of conventional wisdom on how deer came to the Island has reversed.
"We know there's a deer population in Jersey, so the assumption is these animals have gotten into the Arthur Kill," Mr. Pane said, adding, "Deer are strong swimmers ... and if they're in the water during a certain tidal cycle they'll be carried closer to Staten Island."
In 2010, the Advance published a video recorded by a Huguenot man on his boat that captured two deer swimming across the Arthur Kill to Bentley Street in Tottenville.