The town will hold its 2026 shotgun hunting lottery at 6:30 p.m. at Town Hall to select which hunters can access town property during the state’s special firearms deer season in January, Riverhead officials announced Wednesday, Dec. 10.

The lottery is open only to Riverhead residents and property owners. Hunters must appear in person at the Town Board Room, 4 W. Second St., with a current New York State driver’s license and hunting license.

They must have a valid state hunting license, big game tag and landowner endorsement from the town while hunting on town property. The town does not require a separate town hunting license.

All paperwork will be completed on-site before the lottery begins.

Winners will hunt by lottery-assigned dates and times at designated areas within the Calverton Enterprise Park and at 1751 Sound Avenue in Calverton during the Jan. 4-31 season authorized by the state Department of Environmental Conservation, officials said.

The Town Board authorized the lottery and shotgun hunting on town property at its Dec. 2 meeting.

For more information, contact Karen Occhiogrosso in the town attorney’s office at 631-727-3200, ext. 651, or the town recreation department at ext. 737.

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This fall, Southold Highway Dept. workers are picking up an average of one dead deer a day, “and some days we’ll do pickups throughout the day,” said highway superintendent Dan Goodwin, describing that pace as consistent with previous autumns. Mr. Goodwin said that through the beginning of November, 523 deer carcasses had been brought to the town landfill, either by highway dept. staffers or residents.

On Shelter Island at this time of year, “we’re good for three to four a week, at least,” said Ken Lewis Jr., the island’s superintendent of highways and commissioner of public works.

In Riverhead, Mike Zaleski’s highway department staff averages between five and 15 — and sometimes as many as 20 — dead deer a week.

“During hunting season, they get flushed out more, so we definitely pick up more dead deer,” said Mr. Zaleski, a 30-year veteran of the Riverhead Highway Dept.

October through December is the most dangerous season for deer strikes on the North Fork, and across Suffolk County — which last year ranked third out of 62 New York counties for the most annual animal-involved collisions, according to AAA, up from sixth place in 2022. In 2021, Suffolk county had the second most animal collisions statewide.

It’s a perfect storm combo each fall when deer mating season and hunting season coincide with diminished food sources and days where dusk falls around 5 p.m. — when many drivers are commuting home from work.

During mating season, hormone-packed bucks are racing around chasing does.

In their mating season, “they’re more active, they’re up on their feet more often,” said Mr. Goodwin. “There’s less sources of food out there. What’s left of our farms have got cover crop in the fields, so they’re out searching for food and moving around. There’s also not as much camouflage because the trees have dropped their leaves.”

The Riverhead and Southold figures don’t include state and county roads, officials said. 

“We don’t do anything on [Route] 25 and we don’t do anything on Route 48,” Mr. Goodwin said. “Those are all picked up by the state or the county.”

In Riverhead, Mr. Zaleski said that deer pickups don’t include the Long Island Expressway or county roads like Route 58.

On Shelter Island, Mr. Lewis’ highway department handles everything, including Route 114.

“The majority take place on the state road [Route 114], which is probably the busiest thoroughfare for us, because it connects the two ferries,” he said. “And we’ve become a busier place for trade traffic that crosses over from the North Fork to the South Fork, using us as a sort of bridge. So that state road deals with quite a bit.”

If a deer does run out in front of a car, the best thing for a driver to do is not to swerve, experts said. Instead, hit the brakes and honk the horn, which may be enough to startle the animal out of the way. If a crash is inevitable, the best course is to steer into the deer. 

“Drivers should never swerve to avoid any animal, especially on country roads,” AAA Northeast spokesman Robert Sinclair Jr. said in a statement last fall.  

The reason is simple: Swerving to the right could send the car into a ditch, tree or telephone pole, while swerving left could result in a deadly head-on crash with an oncoming vehicle. 

“While it’s not desirable, hitting a deer is better than hitting a tree,” Mr. Sinclair said.

In Shelter Island, the carcasses are compacted and trucked away by waste management services, while Riverhead and Southold bury their own.

“We have a deer pit on town property, in a brush yard of ours,” Mr. Zaleski said. “It’s a hole in the ground, and we fill that up. As they decompose, we put a layer of mulch over them, to keep the smell down and help with quicker decomposition. When the pit fills up, we simply dig another hole.”

Town highway workers also pick up and discard of other animal roadkill, from squirrels and turtles to possums and raccoons.

“It’s not one of the more glamorous parts of the job, that’s for sure,” Mr. Goodwin said.

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The late fall is the peak time for deer strikes because it’s mating season, when hormone-driven bucks — and the does they’re pursuing — are most likely to dash into traffic.

Last year in New York State, there were nearly 37,000 car crashes where an “animal’s actions” was listed as a contributing factor, and most of those were deer strikes, according to DMV data compiled by AAA Northeast.

If a deer does run out in front of a car, the best thing for a driver to do is not to swerve, experts said. Instead, hit the brakes and honk the horn, which may be enough to startle the animal out of the way. If a crash is inevitable, the best course is to steer into the deer. 

“Drivers should never swerve to avoid any animal, especially on country roads,” AAA Northeast spokesman Robert Sinclair Jr. said in a statement released earlier this fall.  

The reason is simple: Swerving to the right could send the car into a ditch, tree or telephone pole, while swerving left could result in a deadly head-on crash with an oncoming vehicle. 

“While it’s not desirable, hitting a deer is better than hitting a tree,” Mr. Sinclair said. 

Suffolk County ranked sixth among the state’s 62 counties with the most animal involved crashes — 1,216 — in 2022. In 2021, the county was home to the second-most documented animal collisions. 

The most dangerous hours are near dusk, when dwindling sunlight and a darkening landscape make it especially hard to see animals.

Mild winters in recent years have limited temperature-related stress and mortality among area deer, and no outbreaks of epizootic hermorrhagic disease have been recently detected in local populations, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which manages deer numbers throughout the state by issuing permits during regulated hunting seasons. 

The area’s herds have exploded in size, with estimates ranging from 6,000 to as many as 10,000 deer living throughout the towns of Riverhead and Southold— six to 10 times what the local ecosystem can sustain. 

While human fatalities from deer strikes are rare, an SUV traveling east on Northern Parkway in Plainview earlier this month reportedly burst into flames after striking a deer that bolted in front the vehicle. The driver and passenger escaped without injury.

AAA Northeast recommends that to protect against deer strikes, drivers should scan the shoulders of the road, stay within the speed limit and keep their high beams on when there’s no oncoming traffic. Rounding curves with limited visibility also requires vigilance and caution. If a crash does occur, move the vehicle to a safe location and contact the police, Mr. Sinclair said, and take photographs of the damage when possible. Deer strikes generally fall under comprehensive coverage so drivers should contact their insurance companies as soon as possible. 

Andrew Hetherington of R&K Precision Autoworks on Sound Avenue in Riverhead said that growing up in the area, he rarely saw deer, but now they are everywhere. Widespread development has cut into their habitat, he said, and “they’ve got nowhere else to go.

“When you’re driving out here, you’ve really got to keep your head on a swivel.” 

Southold Highway Superintendent Dan Goodwin said deer could spring out in front of a car almost anywhere on the North Fork.

“They’re pretty much … all through town,” he said. “They just pop up in a lot of random spots, so you’re kind of at the mercy of wherever they are at a given moment.”

Still, he continued, “the areas where we get them the most are the more heavily wooded areas where there’s not as much clearance between the edge of the road and a tree line where they might be hiding.”

Mr. Goodwin said that mating season, which begins in early November and runs through late December, sees the most deer strikes annually, but he added that “we deal with them all year long.” 

As of Nov. 27, 436 deer carcasses had been brought to the Southold Town landfill, Mr. Goodwin said, 96 of those by highway department members. Others were hauled in by residents.

He said that as long as deer carcasses are in a right of way on state or county roads and property, his department is authorized to retrieve them. But they are not permitted to remove them from private property.

“If a deer gets hit and then wanders onto private property, we can’t pick that up,” he said. 

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A healthy deer population is about 8 to 10 deer per square mile, experts have said. Southold Town has approximately 60 square miles of land. So a deer population that doesn’t destroy the understory in our woods, and does not pose a serious health hazard from tick-borne diseases, would be something like 500 to 600 in all of Southold.

Riverhead Town has about 200 square miles of land. A healthy deer population in that town should not exceed 2,000. As you can see, the estimated 7,000 deer on the North Fork are far above the carrying capacity of the land. Hence farms and vineyards are now surrounded by 8-foot fences, which push the deer into residential areas. 

With our woods stripped of the understory by voracious herds, the damage this overabundance of deer has caused is right before our eyes. Add in health risks and it can be said that the deer population is a menace to our well-being. Bambi is not our friend; he is making people sick.

Bill S4804, sponsored by New York State Sen. Anthony Palumbo (R-New Suffolk), and Assemblyman Fred Thiele (D-Sag Harbor), which would direct the state Department of Environmental Conservation to establish a deer management program in Southold, is a much-needed first step to correct this crisis.

The bill is in Albany, stalled along with other measures like the state budget, but we hope progress can be made. If passed, the bill would revolutionize the culling of deer in our town and would be a model to other East End towns. The serious problems caused by a hugely oversized deer herd cannot continue. Strong measures have to be taken.

In a statement, Mr. Palumbo said: “This legislation has broad community support and the backing of the region’s farmers. A successful deer management program will help prevent the loss and destruction of crops for our small and family-owned farms, saving money and resources, and protecting this vital industry. 

“It will also improve the safety of our roadways, by cutting down on vehicle accidents, and enhance the health and safety of residents by helping to reduce the spread of tick-borne illness.”

If Mr. Palumbo’s bill is enacted into law, new regulations would be under the DEC’s supervision. For the first time, crossbows — which are more accurate and easier to use for older and younger hunters — would be legal to use; hunters could receive some form of compensation for culling the herd; 12- and 13-year-olds under adult supervision would be allowed to hunt. There are additional changes as well.

There is a new aspect to our deer numbers that hunters and others have seen in the past year. A virus called epizootic hemorrhagic disease has killed thousands of white-tailed deer statewide. No firm numbers are available, but experts such as Craig Jobes, a Southold Town environmental analyst, say hundreds in the town have likely died from this disease. Hunters, he said, see dead deer frequently.

“The dead seem to be focused around freshwater bodies such as Laurel Lake” in Mattituck, Mr. Jobes said. He said eventually the deer will develop resistance to the virus, so their numbers will go back up again.

Dan Goodwin, Southold’s highway superintendent, said his crews have seen fewer roadkill deer in recent months, which is also likely because of the virus.

“One farmer we talked to said he saw far less crop damage this year than in previous years,” Mr. Jobes said. “But that will plateau and the population will build back up again.”

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This number is far too large for the square miles of open space on the North Fork, and beyond the destruction of the understory in woodlands across the region, the herd poses an enormous health risk for all of us, with tick-borne diseases so common that almost everyone who lives here knows someone who has been infected, some critically.

Here are some shocking numbers: Up through last weekend, 483 deer killed by cars were disposed of in the Southold Town landfill. In Riverhead, the yearly average is approximately 250 carcasses dumped in that town’s landfill.

And that’s only the deer who died on roads and could be picked up by highway crews. Hundreds more that are hit are not found and crawl off and die in the woods. Setting aside the cruelty of this, consider the millions of dollars in insurance costs to repair damaged cars. The only winners in this catastrophe are the car repair businesses.

The issue of an oversized deer herd and its impact was strongly spelled out at Saturday’s meeting of the Southold Peconic Civic Association. The meeting was timely and important. After hearing two speakers, Southold Town Board member Greg Doroski and Arnold Blair, a member of the Deer Management Task Force, anyone in attendance would have come away shocked at the seriousness of this issue.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Southold contains 53.7 square miles of land; Riverhead contains 67.4 square miles of land. Obviously, development takes up a lot of space, and many farmers and vineyard owners now fence their properties to keep destructive herds away, forcing them into more populated areas. 

Biologists say a healthy herd is approximately 10 to 15 deer per square mile. By that estimate, there are thousands more deer on the North Fork than the environment and open space can handle.

Legislation will be reintroduced in the State Legislature next month that will allow for crossbows in hunting, will put a bounty on deer culled, along with other measures. Our local legislators in both the Assembly and Senate support these measures.

If passed, they are a start. But very strong measures must be taken to reduce a herd that poses an enormous health and safety risk to everyone and has already destroyed the understory of our woodlands. To reduce tick-borne diseases, this huge herd of deer must be culled back to a small number.

The post Editorial: Size of the deer herd on North Fork is at crisis level appeared first on Riverhead News Review.

The lottery is reserved for Riverhead Town residents and/or property owners. The winners will be permitted to hunt for deer only by bow in designated locations and at designated time periods determined by the wildlife committee. 

Anyone wishing to participate must have a valid New York State deer hunting license.

Deer season runs from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31 for the sections at EPCAL and along Sound Avenue in Calverton and from Oct. 1 to Jan. 31 for a section along Middle Road in Riverhead.

The Town Board unanimously approved the resolution setting the lottery date.

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