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Oh Deer!

Fertility project marks decade

Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Charlie Shoemaker⁄The Gazette Rick Naugle (above) scans the deer on the NIST campus in Gaithersburg, searching for females he has yet to dart this season with birth control.

The Humane Society researcher, driving around the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, plans to pick off three, maybe four deer on this early autumn day as he tours the 578-acre Gaithersburg campus, an area ripe with the white-tailed animals.

He spots. He aims. He shoots.

And another Bambi gets her birth control.

In a rapidly growing metropolitan area, where development has pushed wildlife into rare open space areas like NIST, Naugle has led a research project to control the burgeoning populations that have become headaches to their neighbors.

Each September and October, in the months before breeding, Naugle darts the 128 does on the campus with a booster shot of contraception, mitigating the spring birth of fawns that add to the already full herd.

Since the fertility program began a decade ago on NIST’s campus, the deer population has decreased from its peak of 300 animals to a more manageable 207, Naugle reports.

And dangerous collisions, such as cars hitting the animals or rutting deer crashing through office windows, have been slashed, he said.

The project, one of the first of its kind in the nation, is now used as a model with zookeepers and animal care providers around the world, but its roots are still firmly planted at NIST, Naugle and institute spokesman Michael E. Newman said.

For under $10,000 a year, NIST sponsors the Humane Society research as an alternative to culling herds, relocating the animals, or allowing hunters on their grounds.

Unchecked, a deer herd can double in less than five years, and starvation and disease are major concerns, Newman said.

‘‘The city of Gaithersburg has grown around this campus,” Newman said. ‘‘It’s become this microcosm, this buffer zone between wildlife and civilization.”

The dozens of deer that mill around the area, grazing on grass or bedding under shady trees, have made the federal agency a home for generations.

A metal fence was erected around the rolling NIST campus when it opened in 1966. But increased security measures put in place after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks allow fewer deer — drawn to the wooded area when housing developments pop up — to travel in and out of the campus’s several gates.

That’s why Naugle, who graduated with a degree in wildlife and fishery sciences from Pennsylvania State University, continues to control the population with contraceptive-filled darts.

Driving around in his gray pick-up truck with binoculars and a chart by his side, Naugle spots the deer’s yellow and black-tagged ears to determine whether they’re ripe for the booster.

‘‘The way I get my job done is persistence,” said Naugle, 48, of Cascade, Md. ‘‘The big thing is knowing the animals and knowing when to take a shot. You can’t teach people that. You have to learn from experience.”

When they are fawns, Naugle injects the females by hand with a dose of porcine zona pellucida (or PZP) immunocontraceptive, a protein taken from pig eggs that, injected into female deer, elicits antibodies that sperm can’t recognize and don’t penetrate.

As they grow, darting the deer with annual boosters — a contraceptive that is ultimately reversible — allows the birth control to continue.

Fawning rates on the campus have gone from 90 percent in 1996 to 10 percent in 2006, or from 130 fawns born in 1996 to 13 this year, Naugle said.

The vaccine has stayed the same since the program’s inception, and Naugle and other researchers are using the data in hopes of developing a broader tool for humane, effective and practical wildlife population control, they say.

‘‘The vaccine we have in hand should be useful for many urban and suburban communities that are grappling with local deer conflicts,” Allen Rutberg, an expert on immunocontraceptive and assistant professor at Tufts Veterinary School, wrote in an e-mail. ‘‘We don’t expect the contraceptives we have now to be useful on, say, a county-wide scale, but we don’t know yet where the limits are.”

Naugle maintains that the project is difficult to pull off in communities where deer can’t be tagged and tracked. For now, NIST’s fenced campus remains one of the most ideal locations to continue researching the program’s impact, in addition to Fire Island National Seashore in New York, where the first program started in 1993.

Today there are about a dozen researchers testing the vaccine in areas around the world, with fallow and white-tail deer, wild horses, elk, bears and elephants, Naugle said.

Critics of immunocontraception say it is another example of human manipulation of nature, and some hunting organizations say it threatens their sport, according to a 2004 report by Priscilla Cohn, a philosopher and then-professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University who studies animal ethics.

Naugle and Rutberg maintain that it is a more humane tool for population control, especially as rapidly growing areas like Washington, D.C., continue to develop, pushing deer out of one-time wooded enclaves.

Natural predators in the area are rare, but AAA Mid Atlantic reported that there were 2,033 deer-car collisions in Montgomery County in 2000, an average count for the area.

‘‘Really, what people like to call a deer-overpopulation problem is really a land-use problem. We have a lot of deer because they thrive in the environments we create,” Rutberg wrote.

So once again last week, Naugle took to the NIST fields.

‘‘Have I gotten you yet?,” he says to a doe along the trail, checking the chart on his truck’s dashboard.

Naugle grabs his darting rifle and, squinting through his binoculars, waits for the next prime target to cross his path.