Chiba’s big agricultural headache comes in a tiny package

Katsuura, Chiba Pref. - Wiping sweat from his face, Takahiro Morosawa crouches to swap the data card in a camouflage-green trail camera attached to a tree trunk in the forested hills of Hirata, a rural district of Katsuura, Chiba Prefecture. The area is dotted with rice paddies and vast expanses of greenery, not to mention kyon — small deer native to China and Taiwan that have proliferated across the prefecture over the past few decades and are now turning up in neighboring prefectures.“We’re trying to understand how they behave — what time of day they’re active, where they sleep, what they prefer to eat and so on — so we can better monitor their movements and develop effective countermeasures to prevent them from spreading,” says Morosawa, a lecturer at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology’s wildlife management center.Kyon feed on a wide variety of vegetation and can cause considerable damage to agricultural crops, making their continued spread a growing concern for farmers.