By RICK NEBEL
Los Alamos

This is a letter in support of Sally Fellers recent OP-ED in the Post. I do think that there are too many deer in Los Alamos. This is particularly a problem along Diamond Drive and San Ildefonso at night because the deer won’t stay in their lane, won’t use their turn signals, and don’t cross in the cross-walks.  Of course, the same thing can be said of many of the drivers in Los Alamos (myself included). However, I don’t think that restricting bird feeders, etc. is going to have any impact on those problems.

H. L. Mencken once said: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” I suspect that the reason we have so many deer in town is because of the major fires we have had in the last 25 years. When the forests start to grow back, they start with bushes, aspen and other small browse. Deer love browse. I suspect that the deer population has increased in the Jemez and we are seeing the spillover in Los Alamos. Putting restrictions on the residents of Los Alamos isn’t going to have any impact on that. Putting more fencing along the main thoroughfares (like near the roundabout) would at least funnel the deer into a few crossings rather than having them Jaywalking everywhere.

My way of dealing with the deer is to try to have a symbiotic relationship with them.  If the deer want to eat my grass and the wormy windfalls from my fruit trees, that just means less work for me.  I have put a 6 ft. tall fence around my garden which seems to deter all but the most athletic deer. A greenhouse would probably be a better solution.

I did have a bear in my fruit trees this year. If that continues to be a problem, I’ll put some fencing around the trunks so they can’t climb the trees. It used to be that when Los Alamos had a bear problem, the Game and Fish people would tranquilize it and move it to a remote area. Now it seems like all the Game and Fish people want to do is to shove people around.