Chapel Hill has always been a little, uh, different.
A town that grew up around one of the oldest public universities in the nation, most of the time it’s a sleepy Southern village with all the amenities: neatly-cut lawns, fine old houses, even a farmer’s market where produce grown on farms in surrounding counties can be sold to professors’ wives for outrageous prices and they’ll call it “mah-velous.”
Because of the university — mainly its outstanding hospital and great basketball teams — Chapel Hill has earned good will around the state, even though it’s populated by many residents who think Lenin and Mao Tse-tung were pantywaist conservatives.
In short, many North Carolina residents admire the university and, at the same time, shake their heads at some of the things that go on and are spoken in classrooms there. Naturally, you’d expect Chapel Hill politics to be a little wacky at times, and you’d be right.
Speaking of wacky, let’s jump to the town council and whitetail deer.
Because Chapel Hill is an affluent place where lots of residents can afford well-tended homes, and because it’s surrounded by deer-rich Orange County, whitetails have flocked to the Hill like hippies to a Grateful Dead concert.
So what to do about deer-car collisions, tons of expensive greenery going through whitetail digestive tracts, ticks and deer-borne diseases?
At a recent meeting of the town council, a group of citizens presented a request to open several public properties on the periphery of town, plus 1,000 acres around UNC’s small airport, to archery hunting. The council, after several comments from anti-hunting members to the effect they’d never allow deer hunting in their sweet village, tabled the plan.
Problem is, in-season archery hunting for deer on private property inside the city limits has been legal for years. Not only that, a year ago, Chapel Hill quietly joined a growing number of North Carolina municipalities that hold an Urban Archery Season, which runs from mid-January to mid-February, after the regular deer season closes.
It’s just that town officials apparently kept those facts quiet from the general public.
The N.C. Wildlife Commission said there’s no conspiracy to keep hunters uninformed.
“We learned in the first few years of the Urban Archery Season we had to give towns the option of not being listed in our regulations digest,” said Isaac Harrold, a commission official. “Some towns were flooded with requests by (non-resident) bowhunters. They later asked us to not print their town names in the digest; they said they had enough local hunters to do the job.”
Harrold said five or six towns, in addition to Chapel Hill, participate in the UAS without having their names published in the regulations digest.
Where the town council really missed the boat was in not pursuing the idea to allow in-season and UAS hunting on town land and UNC property. Those places are mostly isolated, and residents likely would never see a hunter or a dead whitetail. Moreover, they’re breeding grounds for deer that eventually find their way into town.
In effect, Chapel Hill, which prides itself on being progressive, treats deer hunting like 19th-century folks handled a crazy uncle — lock him in the attic, out of sight, out of mind and hope nobody notices.
Just check with your town to see if it allows urban bow hunting.
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