WASHINGTON — The intruders on Eric and Linda White’s street have grown bold, stalking quietly from yard to yard in broad daylight. When interrupted, they slip through the barricade at the end of the street and disappear into Rock Creek Park. 
 
 The interlopers — white-tailed deer that venture from the park to gorge in yards — are more than just a nuisance. The deer endanger the park itself, according to the National Park Service, which is poised to take a step that has heartened some residents and dismayed others: thinning the herd with sharpshooters. 
 
 The strategy, which the park service is expected to authorize in coming weeks after years of study, has been a source of acrimony. Some residents accuse the service of dragging its feet. Others complain that sharpshooters are a needlessly cruel solution to the deer problem. In 2009, the problem generated impassioned debate at public hearings and hundreds of written comments dissecting the service’s proposals. 
 
 Rock Creek Park, a swath of rolling hills, ravines and towering forests that bisects the city, is not the only national park where the service has opted to use sharpshooters, and the Department of Agriculture has used them at the United States National Arboretum on the city’s eastern edge. 
 
 But the park’s location in the middle of a city — the nation’s capital, at that — presents delicate considerations about safety and strategy, not to mention public relations. 
 
 Linda White, 62, is unsentimental about the problem. Ravenous deer have forced her and her husband to erect mesh barricades, lay down netting and spend thousands of dollars on new landscaping. 
 
 “I think they need to totally get rid of the deer now,” she said. “I don’t care how they do it. Whatever it takes. By any means necessary.” 
 
 Nick Bartolomeo, the chief ranger for the park, said reducing the herd had little to do with its encounters with humans. Rather, the concern is the threat the deer pose to their environment. 
 
 Because of the animals’ grazing, the forest is unable to regenerate. As wind and age topple the massive oaks, hickories and poplars that make up the canopy, or overstory, no young trees survive to replace them. At the same time, the deer leave alone many of the invasive species in the park. 
 
 “This will be a very different park in 30, 40 or 50 years,” Mr. Bartolomeo said. “The overstory trees that you have now won’t be there. The animal species that depend on the understory and those trees won’t be there. It’s going to change the entire nature of the park.” 
 
 The park service considered a range of strategies, including taking no new action, sterilizing deer, and shooting them or capturing them to euthanize them. It settled on a combined approach that includes several tactics but emphasizes the lethal means. 
 
 The issue is common where deer thrive alongside heavily developed areas. Local governments in Maryland and Virginia also cull their deer with hunts and sharpshooters. 
 
 There were virtually no deer in Rock Creek Park until as recently as the 1960s, when sightings began to increase. Suburban development most likely forced the deer into the park from Maryland, and an absence of predators — other than cars — allowed the herd to swell. 
 
 The park service began monitoring the animals’ impact in 1990. Today, it estimates that there are almost 400 deer in the park, and conflicts have become inevitable. Dozens of deer are killed yearly in collisions with cars. In 2009, a deer wandered into the lion enclosure at the National Zoo in front of crowds of children and horrified parents. Several weeks ago, a deer crashed through a window of a public library branch in the city. In both cases, the wounded animals were euthanized. 
 
 But the most typical interactions have forced exasperated homeowners to reach into their bank accounts to restore their landscaping, flower beds and gardens. 
 
 Fences have become an essential backyard barricade. Homeowners spray lion urine on their plants and string bells from the trees. Some have advocated opening the park to hunting, but federal law forbids it. 
 
 So the job of culling the deer will fall to the professionals. It is not yet clear exactly when the cull would take place, because financing is still an issue — about $131,000 in the first year alone. When it does, it is expected to be done at night by government sharpshooters, who would pick off the deer drawn to bait stations placed away from residential neighborhoods. 
 
 The goal is to reduce the herd to 60 to 80 deer over three years. The meat will be donated to local food banks. 
 
 Steven Courtney, 44, a lawyer who lives a block from the park, said that he took the service at its word that there were too many deer, but that he was worried about sharpshooters. Picnickers linger after dark, homeless people live in the woods, and people walk and bike through the park at night, he said. 
 
 “You’re telling the people in the immediate proximity about the sharpshooting that will take place,” he said. “What about the bystanders who are coming from elsewhere, from Maryland or Virginia? They’re not going to necessarily have knowledge of that.” 
 
 Wildlife groups have lined up in opposition. John Hadidian, senior scientist for wildlife at the Humane Society of the United States and a former park service employee, called the plan an “off-the-shelf deer management approach.” He said he was disappointed that the service had not considered reproductive control more seriously and avoided sharpshooting altogether. 
 
 “We were hopeful that they would come up with something that was more innovative,” he said. 
 
 Mr. Bartolomeo said that culling was the only viable strategy, and that every safety precaution would be taken. It took so long to come up with a plan because the service has to follow protocols; developing a science-based solution takes years, and at this point, anything short of sharpshooters would delay action to preserve the park. 
 
 “We don’t have the luxury of time,” Mr. Bartolomeo said. 
 
 Anu Jayaraman, 33, brought her 2-year-old son, Manu, to the park’s nature center on a recent afternoon. On their outings, they sometimes come specifically to look for deer, she said, and often spot them as they walk the trails around the center. 
 
 She balked at the thought of shooting the deer, saying perhaps contraception would be a better way. But she acknowledged that she was not aware of the damage the deer caused. 
 
 “It doesn’t sound very kind, but if the population has to be managed, and they’re good marksmen, it’s a solution,” she said. ||||| This framegrab from a Adams County Sheriff's Department dashboard camera video shows the deer being pulled out of the vehicle by the motorist. (Photo: Adams County Sheriff's Department, Adams County Sheriff's Department) 
 
 It's that time of year in Wisconsin when car-deer accidents spike as the animals move around searching for mates. 
 
 So when a 59-year-old man in Adams County hit and killed a deer last week, he did what many Wisconsinites would do — he put it in his trunk to take home for the delicious venison. 
 
 But before he could return home, the deer woke up. 
 
 Like the Monty Python sketch — "I'm not dead yet!" — the deer was not yet ready to go gently into the night. 
 
 The motorist contacted the Adams County Sheriff's Department around 7:25 p.m. Thursday and when Deputy Brian Loewenhagen arrived on the scene in Easton Township near Grand Marsh, about seven miles southeast of the central Wisconsin communities of Adams-Friendship, his dashboard camera recorded the scene. 
 
 Loewenhagen talked to the motorist for about half a minute before the man gingerly opened his trunk. The deer moved and the motorist pulled it out of the trunk. A few seconds later the deer bounded into the woods on shaky legs. 
 
 Each year tens of thousands of Wisconsin motorists report collisions with deer in addition to countless run-ins that aren't reported because the damage wasn't bad enough or drivers don't want to finagle with their insurance companies for repairs. But this one time, apparently, the deer got the upper hand. Or hoof. 
 
 Adams County Sheriff's Department posted the incident the next morning on its Facebook page with a photo of actors Chris Farley and David Spade in a car in a scene from the movie "Tommy Boy" with a deer in their back seat. 
 
 So this happened last night ... 
 
 "Caller states he hit a deer earlier and thought it was deceased. He states he put the deer into the back of his vehicle, but once he arrived home the deer was alive and kicking..." 
 
 (The deer refused to give a statement and ran into the woods.) 
 
 The Facebook page was updated a few hours later with the footage from Loewenhagen's squad camera. Turns out Loewenhagen is no stranger to unusual calls. 
 
 You may remember our Deputy Brian Loewenhagen from previous posts. He was the Deputy who arrested the Intoxicated driver with the beer battered fish fry excuse. 
 
 Things are never boring when Brian is working. 
 
 The Sheriff's Department's Facebook posts ends with #DeerPlayingPossum and also #ThanksForTheRide. 
 
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– Residents of a suburb of St. Louis, Mo., will hold a candlelight vigil for dead deer tomorrow night. It may sound silly, but residents are also protesting the hefty sum that Town and Country officials have paid to thin the animal's population over the last few years. Vigil organizers say in a press release that the town is forking over "$46,000 to kill 100 deer on as little as two-acre parcels" and has hired out-of-state sharpshooters to handle the job. The goal was to squash the number of car-deer collisions, but organizers say that hasn't happened, KMOX reports. Per the town's deer management reporting, 30 verified car-deer collisions occurred in 2014, compared with 38 in 2013; a 2014 report compiled by Town and Country notes that 87 deer were "harvested" over eight days in January of that year. Resident Barbara Ann Hughes—who has organized the vigil—argues in the release that "biologists on the national level have studied the issue and concur that lethal methods of deer management are NOT effective in an urban setting." But Newser did find one study published in 2008 in Human-Wildlife Conflicts that reviewed suburban sharpshooting management programs in Iowa City, Iowa; Princeton, NJ; and Solon, Ohio. Local deer herds were reduced by 76%, 72%, and 54%, respectively, and deer-vehicle collisions dropped 78%, 75%, and 49%. (In Wisconsin, the deer fight back.)