WARWICK BEACON

01/06/2005

City highway workers remove deer carcasses found near brook

By KELLY SMITH

Part of Steve Insana.s daily chores include checking up on his baby, Buckeye Brook. He has the same spots he goes to where he looks for litter around the banks of the brook, suspicious smells in the area and debris in the water. In doing so last week, he found two dead deer by the brook on Old Warwick Avenue.

Concerned children might see the remains, Insana said he called the Department of Environmental Management to come pick them up. Even though he was not happy someone littered the area around the brook by illegally dumping the carcasses, he said he wasn't worried about himself knowing they were there.

"I just don't want some little kids to walk by and see them," he said. "Especially right after Christmas, I'm afraid they'll think it's Rudolph on the side of the road!"

Insana said someone from the enforcement division at DEM told him the department would be sending someone to pick them up. However, when by Monday the remains were still there, he called again.

"They told me there is a problem around the state," said Insana. "The deer population has grown so much in Rhode Island, there is so much road kill. Because there is so much of this going on around the state, they are not going to touch it."

However, according to Steven Hall, chief of the Division of Law Enforcement with DEM, illegally discarded deer remains on public property, though it does happen, is not a common occurrence.

"I wouldn't say it.s a huge problem," said Hall. "We do get reports of it on occasion. It does happen every year multiple times, but it's not an epidemic. We get a lot more calls of road kill."

Hall said when deer are killed on the road, DEM will usually call sportsmen's clubs to see if any of them want to come get the deer for the meat, provided it is in condition good enough to eat. If none are interested, he said DEM would then come make the pick-up. This has been the case a lot more, said Hall, because the number of road kill over the years has risen from a few dozen a year to hundreds.

By Tuesday, the carcasses, which had been cut open and the meat taken out of them, had been sitting there for at least a week when Insana decided to call the city and see if they might help out.

"I didn't think they would want to touch it," he said. "But they were nice enough to say they'd go over there and get it."

Public Works director Dave Picozzi agreed to remove the carcasses, and Tuesday afternoon they were picked up and brought to the landfill.