This year is my 23rd living on Vashon, and during that time I have logged over 500 hours and 2,000 miles walking and jogging around Island Center Forest (ICF). I have never seen a deer during any of that time. Occasionally I have seen hoof prints in the mud and very rarely have heard an animal, which I assume was a deer, crashing unseen through the brush. The six years that the ICF hunting season has been open equates to just over 100 days with “296 visits” by hunters over that time, penciling out at about three visits per day. In six years, 22 deer have been harvested for an average of four deer per year.

Although I have only personal observation to go by, I am pretty sure that a typical non-hunting day in ICF attracts many more than three visits by walkers, joggers, mountain bikers and horseback riders. Four deer harvested per year clearly doesn’t represent a meaningful reduction in our “wild” ungulate over-population. On any given evening, I could shoot more deer than that off my deck.

I am not anti-hunting and in fact wish that hunting could make a much bigger impact on the island’s deer population, but it is pretty clear to me that the ICF hunting period doesn’t represent a very good deal for the many users of that forest, especially with only about 20 percent of those hunting visits coming from Vashon residents. (With that value factored in, we are now down to below one visit per day.) Vashon hunters presumably know that staking out an open apple orchard at dusk is a much better prospect. I, for one, would like to see the season reduced to a week and the forest trails reopened to the rest of us.

— Pat Call