Project to study effect of deer herd on trees
Woodland Hills High School will be one of at least six high schools statewide to participate in a deer-foraging study coordinated by the Audubon Society.
Jo Smerdel, a science coordinator in the high school's gifted program, is using an $800 grant from the Woodland Hills Academic Foundation to help high school students examine the effect that the local deer population has on foliage.
As part of the project, students will build deer pens that will protect plants from grazing deer and then compare the condition of those plants and trees to those left vulnerable to the white-tail deer, which number at least 1.3 million in the state.
The two-year project will give Joanna Drummond, 14, a Churchill ninth-grader, a chance to study a deer population on a local commercial property that she used to wonder about when she was in junior high school.
Evening travellers heading east on the Parkway East can get a glance at the ample deer population that grazes on the fenced Viacom (formerly the Westinghouse) property, which stretches from the Forest Hills border into Churchill.
"When I was going to East (Junior High School, in Turtle Creek) my bus passed the property and I saw them every day. I just kind of figured that there was a lot of food there and they must have just jumped the fence," Drummond said.
Smerdel said the students will set up test pens on the Viacom property and on a small green space on the high school campus called Woodland Hollow.
Other Allegheny County schools participating in the statewide Audubon project are Shaler Area and Deer Lakes high schools.
Smerdel said students had been insisting for years that deer populated the hollow, but she never believed them, until this past fall.
Students were giving her a tour of the hollow this October when a husky male deer almost bounded right into the group.
"I was laughing so hard," Smerdel said. "It was like somebody said, 'Cue the deer.'"
Kathy Randall, a conservation program coordinator with Audubon Pennsylvania, said the organization is shepherding the project to give high school students an idea of how devastating deer can be on wild bird populations and on a forest's understory, the area between the canopy and the forest floor.
"An overabundant population of deer can destroy the understory of a forest so they can have an impact on those bird populations," Randall said.
Schools in the eastern part of the state that are participating are Twin Valley High School in Elverson, Berks County; Owen J. Roberts High School in Pottstown, Chester County; and the Walter Biddle Saul School of Agricultural Sciences in Philadelphia.
Randall said Audubon Pennsylvania plans an October symposium in Harrisburg at which students participating in the project will be able to compare their results.
