Hoping to ambush an unsuspecting deer, Chris McAvinue perched precariously in an oak tree as darkness became dawn.
The distant drone of traffic from Interstate 83 penetrated the dense woods of Gunpowder Falls State Park in northern Baltimore County. Pulley-aided compound bow in hand, McAvinue stood almost statue-still, peering slowly about for his quarry.
For most Marylanders, autumn is a season of colorful foliage, falling leaves and migrating waterfowl. But for thousands of outdoors enthusiasts, it is also hunting season, a chance to get into the woods, to fight off cold, sleep and boredom and maybe bag a deer.
"It's mostly standing around waiting," said McAvinue, 38, a department store engineer from Parkton. That's why it's called hunting and not killing, he added. "You don't spend a lot of time killing."
But for some, the killing is a problem. This fall has sparked renewed skirmishing between hunters and animal lovers in Maryland.
"We believe that it's legalized animal cruelty," said Norman Phelps, program coordinator for the Fund for Animals in Silver Spring.
Protests last week from animal lovers and other park users prompted the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to postpone the first bow hunting for deer in Sandy Point State Park near Annapolis. A public meeting has been scheduled for 7 p.m. Wednesday at the park.
State wildlife officials say they are trying to expand hunting to curb Maryland's growing deer population, and to encourage a dwindling pastime. The state has about 120,000 hunters, about 50,000 of whom use bows.
Once hunted until they nearly vanished, deer have increased in number in Maryland from a few thousand in the 1930s to an estimated 300,000 today, explained Joshua L. Sandt, the DNR's director of wildlife and heritage. With no natural predators to control their numbers, deer have flourished to the point that they are damaging forest foliage and roaming out of the woods to feed on farm crops and suburban gardens.
"A deer population has the ability to double in a year," Sandt said. Hunters legally kill about 60,000 a year, and Sandt estimates that a similar number are killed by motor vehicles, disease and harsh weather. Wild dogs and coyotes also take some.
Sandt calculates that another 50,000 deer must die to keep the herds from growing. In order to stabilize the population, he said, "we need to take half of it."
