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One day in 2007, after a morning spent at Sligo Creek Park removing invasive plants so the native plants could survive, Sally Gagne took a moment to relax and look back on the acre of parkland she had proudly worked on to save.

Her pride quickly turned to panic.

"I couldn't believe how little was left," said Gagne, a Silver Spring resident and founder of the Friends of Sligo Creek, a local citizens group dedicated to improving the quality of the Sligo Creek Watershed, which covers 11.6 square miles from Wheaton to Hyattsville. "There were very few young trees and even fewer native plants."

A new adversary – a rapidly increasing deer population in Sligo Creek – had gotten to the plot before Gagne could, eating all of the native plants and saplings. The deer problem was bad in 2007, Gagne said, and is even worse now. And for the first time, FOSC is debating whether to cull the deer population in Sligo Creek before the entire ecosystem is ruined.

"It will happen slowly, but the woods will be gone," said Gagne, who is also a former FOSC president. "The whole community of woods, the animals that live there and the birds that fly through."

By FOSC's count, there are anywhere between 98 and 123 deer within one square mile along Sligo Creek Parkway between Colesville Road and Arcola Avenue in Silver Spring. Depending on the area, there should be between 15 and 30 deer per square mile for the ecosystem to be unaffected, according to Montgomery County Parks Department officials.

At 19 county parks, a deer-management program is implemented, using some form of sharpshooting or controlled hunting. The program covers more than 15,000 acres and 44 percent of county parkland.

Sharpshooting is performed by trained marksmen from the Maryland-National Capital Parks Police. They ride through the county's parks from 5:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. Perched on the back of pickup trucks, they shoot deer that have been baited into certain areas. The sharpshooting takes place between January and April with sharpshooting a total of three to four times at each park during those months, said Rob Gibbs, natural resources manager with Parks and a supervisor for the Montgomery County Deer Management Work Group. Anywhere from 25 to more than 100 deer are killed per night, Gibbs said.

"Controlled hunting" selects qualified hunters through a lottery system to hunt in controlled park areas with a high density of deer. The hunters can either keep the deer they shoot or donate their kill, and the meat that comes with it, to charities and food banks. (All deer meat from sharpshooting programs is donated to charity. Through mid-October, about 8,000 pounds of deer meat have been donated in the past two harvesting seasons, according to Parks statistics.)

Many of the parks in the downcounty area are too small, too narrow or too urban for sharpshooting or controlled hunting, Gibbs said. But many deer are moving downcounty because they have grown wise to some of the longer-standing upcounty sharpshooting programs. The gradual countywide decrease in deer-automobile collisions — more than 2,000 in the year 2000 to just 1,800 last year — is not due to fewer deer. It is due to more of them inhabiting downcounty areas with lower speed limits, Gibbs said.

The deer population at Sligo Creek has increased almost twofold since 2007, leaving FOSC with a difficult predicament: Lobby for sharpshooting or controlled hunts to save the park but risk angering some FOSC members who have spoken out against the methods. Opponents say sharpshooting is too dangerous at parks in dense residential areas or is inhumane. A spokeswoman with the Montgomery County Humane Society said the organization does not have a policy on deer management.

"We don't want to get the neighborhood so riled up and angry at us that it begins to impact our other programs," said Bruce Sidwell, FOSC's president. "... It could end up being a lose-lose: not controlling deer and losing a lot of members."

But at least part of the watershed is among future sites where Parks would like to begin sharpshooting. The Sligo Creek Stream Valley Park, units 3, 4 and 5 — the aforementioned square mile between Colesville and Arcola — is one of six locations marked for viable deer-management programs. But the program will only begin when money is made available to do so.

To start those six programs, which by Parks estimations would harvest a total of 355 deer initially, would cost about $150,000. The money would either pay for additional staffing or overtime hours for the current trained sharpshooters.

It's a small amount of money that could go a long way for a program already "stretched as far as we can go," Gibbs told the Montgomery County Council's Public Safety committee in a worksession Thursday. The deer-management program, which began in 1995 but now has only two full-time employees, received $121,000 in fiscal 2009 and $91,000 in fiscal 2010, according to a letter from county Parks Department director Mary Bradford to the County Council in August.

In Thursday's meeting, Council President Philip M. Andrews (D-Dist. 3) of Gaithersburg praised the deer-management program's work but said additional funding "will be one of the issues and priorities to weigh against everything else in the budget." It's unlikely any of the six future deer-management sites will be funded for this season, Gibbs said.

Meanwhile, even if FOSC can come to an agreement on sharpshooting at the park, by the time a program is implemented the Sligo Creek ecosystem will be damaged beyond repair, Gagne said. She has resigned from running FOSC's Removal of Invasive Plants program because even her hard work, like on that day in 2007, is no match for her new neighbors.

"Everybody is affected by it," Gagne said. "I can't imagine letting all these plants disappear."