When the natural splendor of a wooded tract in Bay Ridge was threatened by a bulldozer, residents of the tony community a stone’s throw away from the Naval Academy in Annapolis banded together and agreed to an annual tax to protect the forest.
But now, a decade later, those neighbors are divided over what some say is a different form of encroachment: roving deer that devour vegetation and wreak havoc in those woods.
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With a cull conducted by U.S. Department of Agriculture sharpshooters scheduled to take place sometime between Thursday and April 1, longtime friends are avoiding each other for fear that polite conversation will lead to angry words over each side’s motivations.
“It’s like politics or religion,” said Jane McWilliams, a longtime resident and author of “Bay Ridge on the Chesapeake,” an illustrated history of the bayside community. “I was at a meeting last night with 10 people, and we didn’t talk about it. We decided that because we are all friends and neighbors who like each other, we would not talk about it. It’s like that these days.”
“Good people should be able to disagree with each other,” said Rosemary Miller, 72, a retired teacher who serves as head of the Bay Ridge Civic Association’s forest management committee, which oversees conservation efforts in the woods of Bay Ridge. “That’s what has gotten so wobbly about this. Each side feels strongly about what they believe is the best thing to do.”
For many residents of the community of historic cottages, modest bungalows and stylish mini-mansions, preoccupations such as beach cleanup and area development have given way to an obsession over what to do about the deer.
Both sides agree that something needs to be done about the animals’ population — which is, depending on whom you ask, 25 to 30 in the 355-acre community of about 430 homes. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources considers 30 deer per square mile — 600 acres, an area almost twice the size of Bay Ridge — an amount that could cause significant damage to plant life and destroy the ecological diversity of a wooded area.
After the Bay Ridge Civic Association, the local homeowners group, began considering what to do about the deer at its members’ behest, it formed a subcommittee that recommended relocating the deer and studying the extent to which they threatened the forest.
But the subcommittee was ultimately disbanded, and the civic association’s board voted several months ago to authorize the USDA cull.
USDA sharpshooters will be prohibited from hunting within 150 yards of the home of any resident who does not give permission. The hunt, which was contracted for $11,000, will be unannounced. The venison will be donated to the Maryland Food Bank, authorities said.
Opponents said they fear a shooting accident. Irene Howie, a resident who opposes the hunt, said that the association board entered into the contract without authorization of the membership — expenditures of more than $5,000 are required to be pre-approved by a vote of the membership, according to BRCA’s bylaws — and in what she believes to be a violation of a conservation easement on the woods which prohibits hunting.
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