Orcas weighs deer hunting on beloved preserves

Published 1:30 am Monday, March 30, 2026

The trails of Turtleback Mountain Preserve wind through old-growth fir, past quiet wetlands and open rocky balds. For many residents, it is a sanctuary. Now, a proposal by the San Juan County Conservation Land Bank to open select areas to manage deer hunting is testing what kind of public land this community wants, and what the land itself needs.

The ecological case

For botanist Madrona Murphy, born and raised on Lopez Island, the proposal can’t come soon enough. “The biggest predictor of the size of both the camas flowers and the camas bulbs was the presence or absence of deer,” she said. “The deer weren’t killing the plants, but browsing them enough to keep them significantly smaller — unable to produce more flowers and more seeds.”

The damage extends to rare species. “Deer were one of the major threats to the Island Marble butterfly on San Juan and Lopez — they’d go through and eat the flowers off the mustards where the butterfly lays its eggs, and while they weren’t targeting the caterpillars, they ate an awful lot of them,” Murphy said. “We actually proposed fencing deer out of the mustard patches to try to protect them.”

Samantha Martin, an Orcas Island biologist of 20 years, became a hunter because of what she witnessed. “My main inspiration was seeing the impact that the overpopulation of deer has on native vegetation — specifically wildflowers and pollinator habitat,” she said. “It becomes almost impossible to do restoration here in some areas without fencing. You can’t fence everything.”

Grey Tyson, a seven-year North Shore resident, recalled the 2021 adenovirus outbreak: dead deer everywhere, three or four on her own lawn, the smell pervasive all summer. Murphy cautioned against overstating its impact: “There is no accurate estimate of the population of deer on the island, so you can’t say that 90% died because we don’t know how many there were to begin with.”

The plan

Orcas Preserve Steward Peter Guillozet said the initial zone would be off-trail on the preserve’s north-eastern side, away from homes and trails. Closed Land Bank parcels can’t substitute, he explained, because access runs through private roads the agency doesn’t own. Safety measures include vests at the trailhead, one party of two per day, a 100-foot buffer from trails and neighboring properties, and daylight hours only.

The safety concerns

Not everyone is reassured. Jeff Otis, a retired county planner who lives adjacent to the Turtleback boundary, carries memories that never faded.

“In 1999, somebody was hunting on what is now the Turtleback property and shot a bullet through my house,” Otis said. It passed through his office and lodged in a beam aimed toward the kitchen, where he could have been standing. “It sounded like a bomb going off,” he recalled.

In November 2023, a hunter was killed by another hunter’s shotgun on Bureau of Land Management land on Lopez — the official ruling was a tragic accident, the shooter unable to see the victim through the trees. “The Land Bank is saying if there’s hunting on Turtleback, it would be with firearms that don’t shoot very far, including shotguns,” Otis said. “Well, this man was killed with a shotgun.”

Otis read directly from the Land Bank’s own website: “A refuge for wildlife and haven for those who wander through a mosaic of forests, wetlands and open meadows.” “To me, that feels like a breach of the public trust,” he said. “Just the knowledge that hunting would even be allowed on Turtleback would destroy that for me,” he said.

Otis also argued that development, not deer, is the root cause. “As the island got more developed — replacing native plants with grass and gardens — that removes native vegetation and shifts deer to what open areas remain.” He proposed requiring new developments to retain native vegetation, and questioned whether hunting even strengthens the herd: “Disease is a natural selector for killing off the weaker in the population. Hunting is really just the opposite — it’s a non-natural selection.”

A 10-year study published in Ecology and Evolution on Nov. 8, 2019, by Cornell University researcher Bernd Blossey tested three deer management strategies — fertility control, recreational hunting and no management — and found that neither of the first two worked.

Despite sterilization rates of 90%, fertility control failed to reduce deer populations. Blossey was blunt about hunting: “Recreational hunting does not control the deer population, and it does not help in reducing deer impacts.” The study has since been replicated across New York State and in the Midwest.

Tribal access

Turtleback Mountain sits within the ancestral territory of Coast Salish peoples, and the Land Bank has proposed a dedicated two-week window for tribal hunting access. Murphy said, “The balance in the islands between deer and people and plants really was from Coast Salish traditional hunting. Orcas has a particularly high density of deer — it seems to me an excellent opportunity for responsible management, local food, and a way for the Orcas community to actually help manage those land bank properties.”

Martin called the tribal provision significant: “I just think that’s a really important gesture and effort to make towards co-stewardship.”