Brian Laird on WNC and we will close the show today with our climate segment of the week which we do every Tuesday

And in this case your calls to help us report this climate story on an unlikely sign perhaps of climate change more deer.

So in the past decade the deer population in New York has exploded.

According to a USA Today analysis, hunters killed almost

232,000 deer in 2022 alone, a 10% increase from the year before, and back in the

1950s when they began tracking the

sort of data and when hunting was much more popular an average of just 57,000

deer were hunted every year.

My elder winters are helping deer, that's the top line, and the deer ticks that carry Lyme disease

survive, and beyond the hunting numbers there is a human toll emerging. A new

article in Lohud serving Westchester in Rockland breaks it down like this.

More than 70,000 New Yorkers

suffer injuries or financial hardships

after their vehicle was hit deer on roads each year.

Another 7,000 residents fall seriously ill each year with debilitating symptoms of Lyme disease caused

by the ticks that survive on the deer.

And New York farmers report their deer-related crop damage losses to be about $59 million a year now, a lot more than in the past.

So joining us now to break down the link between climate change, deer, and how these populations can be managed to reduce car accidents

and Lyme disease and crop damage is Tony Lynn Morelli, research ecologist at the Northeast

Climate Adaptation Science Center,

an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Environmental Conservation

at the University of Massachusetts.

...