Over the last decade and a half, Hunters Helping the Hungry has delivered 2.2 million quarter-pound servings of fresh venison to families.
The hunt begins in darkness. Les Giese and his son Thor make their way through a public forest in Annandale, New Jersey to a tree stand where they’ll wait for dawn and if they’re lucky — a deer. We settle in, 25 feet above the ground, watching the sun rise through the trees. THOR GIESE: It's getting in between where they live and where they eat.
"Right now, we're doing roughly 25,000 pounds of venison a year. Pretty close to 100,000 meals across the various food banks and pantries of New Jersey," said Les Giese. The problem of deer overpopulation in the forests of states like New Jersey is getting worse, but so is hunger. And it's places like this where the solutions to those two crises come together.
From the rockies to New England and the deep South, white-tailed deer populations have exploded in recent decades. After being decimated by hunters in the 1930s, deer have made a stunning recovery, increasing one-thousand-fold in less than a hundred years. Jay Kelly is a biologist at Raritan Valley Community College. He says more and more deer squeezing into smaller and more fragmented forests is sending the entire ecosystem into free fall.
"The canopy of leaves will come out of these angelica trees are these enormous compound leaves that have thorns on the stems of the leaf thorns and the leaf leaves and leaflets themselves. It's just armed with all sorts of defenses on every inch of the tree. It's really incredible," said Kelly. Duke Farms Nature Preserve in Hillsborough, New Jersey is a stark example of how quickly that change can happen.
Kelly says short of reintroducing predators like wolves to these forests, hunting is the most effective means of reducing deer populations. But the number of hunters in the U.S. has been in steady decline since its peak in the 1980s. "We see anywhere from 50 to 70 clients, which pretty much means since COVID. And now in the height of financial inflation and everything else, we can see on average a person every three minutes," said Gorman.
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