Chair Sue Hagedorn began the September 7 meeting of the Deer Task Force by discussing Lyme and other tick-borne disease, calling it a “significant problem.” According to the report prepared by DTF member Terry Delaney, the Block Island Medical Center saw 50 cases of Lyme in June 2021, which“does not include those visitors who sought treatment off island.”
Delaney’s report stated it was the Town Council in 1966 that voted to bring deer to Block Island in the first place. According to the report, on February 24, 1967, one buck and three does were brought to the island.
That buck and those does were fruitful and multiplied, and there are untold numbers of their descendants roaming Block Island today. The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management states that a healthy deer herd size is 10 per square mile. That would equate to 100 on Block Island. TheDEM has recorded an average of 267 deer killed annually on Block Island over the past five years.No one actually knows the exact size of the Block Island deer herd, although a flyover conducted by DEM in February 2017 estimated there were 650 deer on Block Island.The DTF has worked on determining
