A deer enjoys safe public land at the 'Mount Trashmore' landfill. The city's annual bow hunt limits hunters to private land with permission. (Liz Martin/SourceMedia Group News)

CEDAR RAPIDS — The city’s sixth annual urban bow hunt of deer starts on Saturday, and proponents of the hunt say the numbers all are trending in the right direction:

Fewer deer inside the city. Fewer deer-vehicle crashes. Fewer complaints — about too many deer, and about the hunt itself.

“There is empirical data that indicates that there is a reduced deer herd within the city limits and there has been a decrease in deer-vehicle collisions,” Greg Buelow, spokesman for the Cedar Rapids Fire Department, which oversees the city’s bow hunt, said this week. “Any decrease in accidents means that fewer citizens are getting injured.”

Complaint calls have “substantially” decreased since the hunt’s inception, he added.

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources’ annual aerial deer count for the city and its border areas put the deer count after last year’s hunt at 1,938 deer, down from a high of 3,098 three years earlier.

The number of deer-vehicle crashes — the City Council’s central justification for instituting the hunt five years ago — has dropped by 37 percent since 2005 as figured by one measure, the number of deer carcasses picked up along highways and streets in the city by city employees.

Bow hunt enthusiast Bert Carmer has his own numbers. Carmer, 62, has taken about 50 deer himself from privately owned timber in the city’s northeast quadrant over the five years of the hunt, and he personally testified this week that it’s harder to find deer in that part of Cedar Rapids than it had been. He said he and his grandson, Tyler, will be lucky to nab five does each between the start of the bow hunt this Saturday and the end of the urban hunt, Jan. 30.

“We’ve taken quite a few does out of there, and so you’re going to reduce the breeding population. Which is what they want us to do,” he said.

Tim Thompson and Greg Harris, DNR biologists in Eastern Iowa, reported this week that a statewide effort to reduce the deer population actually has succeeded in bringing deer numbers in northwest Iowa and much of northern Iowa in line with where the state agency believes they need to be.

That is not true everywhere in the state, though, and both biologists said urban hunts continue to be necessary to manage deer populations in places like Cedar Rapids. Cities, they said, become refuges for deer if hunting is not permitted in the city as it is in the countryside around the city.

Within three years, the deer herd numbers in Cedar Rapids would be back to pre-hunt numbers if the bow hunt in the city were abandoned, Harris said.

The city, he added, could do even a better job of reducing its deer numbers if it opened up certain public spaces to bow hunters, such as the sprawling area around the Mount Trashmore landfill.

In contrast, the city of Coralville, which has a decade-old urban bow hunt, allows bow hunters to hunt on certain city-owned land in several different parts of the city.

Coralville police Lt. Bruce Freeman, who administers the Coralville bow hunt, said this week that required proficiency testing and a classroom session “where I yell at them for an hour not to mess up” has made for safe hunting in Coralville.

Fifty-six hunters have signed up to date for this year’s bow hunt in Coralville and 77 in Cedar Rapids, though, city officials in Cedar Rapids expect about the same number of hunters, 128, as last year. Hunters took 312 deer in Cedar Rapids last year and 135 in Coralville.

Among other cities conducting urban bow hunts are Dubuque, Waterloo, Cedar Falls, Muscatine and Bettendorf, though the city of Iowa City, for one, does not use a bow hunt.

In years past, Iowa City has paid sharp shooters to thin the city’s deer herd, but the city manager’s office there said this week that the city has no plans for new deer controls until at least 2011-2012. Low deer harvest numbers and a reduction in deer-vehicle crashes were cited as the reason.

In Cedar Rapids, hunting enthusiast Carmer recalled the first year of the Cedar Rapids hunt five years ago when his tires were slashed and paint was tossed on his pickup after he appeared in The Gazette to advocate for the bow hunt in the face of some vocal opposition to the idea. No such vandalism has happened to him since.

Now, in fact, Carmer is willing to suggest that the city ought to modify its rules and allow limited bow hunt on public land inside the city, including Bever Park and areas along the Cedar River.

“I know that will hit some buttons,” he said.