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On a recent day in Riverview Park on Pittsburgh’s North Side there’s no sign of deer. Federally sanctioned sharpshooters have made sure of that.
No tracks, no visible buck rub on tree bark, no droppings. The deer’s meal of choice - sprouts and seedlings - are visible along park trails. Groundcover grows in abundance in the 260-acre park, the result, in part of residents rallying over the last few years to control the deer population.
“This is how we wanted it to be,” said Alison Keating, chair of Friends of Riverview Park’s deer committee, admiring the wood line of the park.
Keating, of Manchester, was among a group of residents, from government officials to neighborhood leaders, who conceived a war against the deer.
Sharpshooters, armed with silenced rifles, worked overnight to take out 136 deer from mid-February to March 31, said Erica Heide, a senior park ranger at Frick Park. That’s almost 30 more deer than what archers in the city’s 2023 pilot program bagged – and in less time, Heide said.
“They’re using thermal imaging, and all sorts of high-tech equipment to make sure that they have a safe shot before they take it,” Heide said.
It’s not clear if the sharpshooters will return: Officials must debrief with both City Council and staff to determine what methods will be used in the next season, she said. A report from the city is expected to follow.
Heide said the city only expects to use the sharpshooters to get the population under control, after which archers will maintain it.
Other communities and even national parks have used sharpshooters through a U.S. Department of Agriculture program to manage the deer population.
In Pittsburgh, Riverview saw some of the worst ecological damage of all city’s parks by overgrazing, according to Keating and rangers at the city’s Public Safety department.
The residents’ battle began when a herd decimated Mardi Isler’s front yard.
At about 7 a.m. sometime in 2022, Isler, of Squirrel Hill, woke up to find the deer had hit her block between Wightman Street and Murray Avenue, leaving nothing but half stems and droppings. Her home’s decent distance from both Schenley and Frick parks should have spared her garden from the deer, she thought.
“There shouldn't be nine deer walking down my street on some sunny, 7 a.m. morning, having just eaten all of my neighbors’ flowers and mine,” Isler said.
Later, some deer returned – and wouldn’t leave.
“One day my husband and I came out, and there were two deer standing there right by my front porch,” Isler said. “And [he] started to bang on the chairs – we had metal chairs – and he started to bang on the chairs.”
“They just looked at us like, ‘What? You want us to move?’ So, he had to get a hose to get rid of them,” Isler said.
Isler was fed up.
A retired United Way employee who at the time was president of the Squirrel Hill Urban Coalition, Isler leveraged her community leadership role and started calling around.
It wasn’t long before she met Keating, who told her that Riverview had been having similar issues with overgrazing.
The two formed the Protect Our Parks, a group of park rangers, veterinarians, landscapers, and disgruntled neighbors who pressed the city for a solution to the deer.
They met with Mayor Ed Gainey and other city officials.
"By actively managing our city’s deer population, we’re not only preserving the health and beauty of Pittsburgh’s parks for future generations — we’re also transforming an ecological challenge into a source of nourishment for our neighbors,” Gainey said in an emailed statement on Wednesday. “This program is a testament to what we can achieve when compassion, safety, and sustainability guide our work."
In prior meetings, Protect Our Parks received pushback from Humane Action Pittsburgh, an animal rights group.
“Any method – lethal or no[t] – must be repeated every year, indefinitely,” Shannon Dickerson, director of operations for Humane Action, said in an email. “The method the city is using is cheaper because it will not work. An effective lethal program would cost more in the long term than an effective nonlethal one.”
Nonlethal options were explored, but none proved as efficient and cost-effective as a lethal approach, Heide said. So, in September 2023 city officials began a pilot archery program in Frick and Riverview parks.
From that program, 108 deer in total were harvested, according to a report.
In 2024, the archery program was expanded into Schenley, Highland, and Emerald View parks, according to a city report. Archers bagged 199 deer by Jan. 25, 2025.
Deer overpopulation causes ecological damage and can lead to more traffic accidents, according to a report by University of Pittsburgh students and Jeremy Weber, a professor of environmental economics. The report also said that archery alone wouldn’t be enough to hold back the deer population.
This year’s more targeted approach involved sharpshooters in teams of three who entered the parks after they closed at 11 p.m., Heide said. They shot the deer with a silenced rifle, before logging the kill and loading them onto their truck.
“We really like to refer to it as targeted harvesting,” Heide said, “as we are honestly targeting the skinny or weak deer in the population and removing [them].”
As for Isler, the advocate of the sharpshooters and culling programs, she only has one last request before she is satisfied with the city.
“Next year I hope we’re in Hays [Woods],” Isler said.
