Block Island Times

Hunting for solutions with the RIDEM

At the request of the Town Council, two staff members of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management visited the island on Monday, March 27 and sat down with the council to discuss deer management.First Warden Keith Stover told Dylan Ferrara and David Kalb of DEM that although there had been a Deer Task Force for years, there were currently not enough people to fill the committee. “So we need to re-set the conversation,” he said. “We’ve been doing the same things for a while.”Ferrara said he had been working with the town since 2017 and that he “wants to keep deer management moving forward.” He told the councilors that the DEM is planning on doing a population survey across the state that would include the island. “The assumption now is that there are too many deer now on Block Island.”Some of the challenges of hunting on the island are due to special rules that are different from the rest of the state. These primarily include a season that starts and ends later, the prohibition of hunting on weekends and holidays, and the prohibition of hunting on

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