Field guide: White-tailed deer
What does it say when we can call Bambi the country's most dangerous animal?
A few months ago, when I was attempting to sort out my car insurance, I ordered a report on my driving record. The document listed an accident that it took me a moment to recall: years back, while driving at twilight through the emptiness of the Arkansas Delta, a deer suddenly leaped across the highway, bounced off my hood, and then disappeared on into the dark. I’d forgotten the experience, mostly because it felt so routine, so normal, and the damage was minor.
My friend Birney Imes suggested last summer that I write about white-tailed deer, since almost everyone in the South will at some point have this same experience. (“Hope I don’t bring bad juju down on myself for suggesting this,” he wrote.) Indeed, despite their Bambi reputation, deer can be called “America’s most dangerous animal.” The annual human death toll from “DVCs,” as deer-vehicle collisions are known to science, is in the hundreds. (The deer death toll is, of course, far higher.) And the trouble with deer is not just car accidents: Deer have become “one of the most, like, pressing issues that farmers across [Georgia] are facing right now,” one row-crop farmer told NPR last year.
As the writer Erika Howsare puts it in the title of her recent book, we live in The Age of Deer. But this is a species worth contemplating not just for their abundance.
Consider the word wilderness—or wild-doer-ness in Old English. A place of wild animals. Deer, or doer, were the ur-beast, the exemplar of nonhuman spaces.
Today, deer hardly seem wild. These were the creatures I saw most often growing up in suburban Connecticut; to run in the park in the rain was to see the deer, shocked that I’d intrude on their domain. (Their presence also contributed to the fact that twice as a child I contracted Lyme Disease, which is named for a town near where I grew up.) All that to say white-tailed deer are not solely Southern creatures, obviously—though we are home to several interesting subspecies, most of which developed after living on islands long enough to diverge genetically from the mainland populations. The Key deer, for example, lives in the Florida Keys and is smaller than most white-tailed deer (and, unlike deer at large, is considered an endangered species). Howsare’s book offers a winning ramble across this continent of deers, including the South; she visits the Arkansas Ozarks to discuss one more deer problem, chronic wasting disease. (That problem, she notes, typically begins on deer farms before spreading to the wild.)
Howsare notes that deer now occupy “a middle zone” between the extreme of domestication on one side and pure wildness on the other. Species in the first group, like dogs, are completely intertwined with humans and thrive alongside us. Species in the second group, like panthers and whales, would be better if humans were gone. Deer are the lucky wild creatures that seem to do better in our presence—“the largest wild animals we still live with in any widespread way, one of the signal species of our time, as firmly established in our cities as our national parks,” Howsare writes. “Like any family member, they stir knotty feelings.”
North America was once home to 62 million whitetail deer, according to the writer and naturalist Dan Flores. In the 1600s, ten square miles in the Carolinas or Virginia would contain 400 deer.1 But Flores considers it a “rule of thumb” that such populations would survive for only a decade after the arrival of European settlers. By 1776, the British Crown considered banning all deer hunting in the colonies.2
By this point, the story of deer had gone global; a disease had struck cattle herds in France, and to replace the lost leather, merchants began to import American deerskins. It’s largely forgotten now, overshadowed by stories of cotton and sugar farming, but this was the first major colonial economy on the Mississippi River, too. Natchez was founded as, essentially, a trading post where the French could acquire skins hunted further upstream. Flores notes that by the 1780s, the Choctaw—“only one tribal group among scores”—supplied Europeans with a hundred thousand whitetail skins each year. As the deer populations declined, North American geography was reshaped; Southeastern hunters began to push west, across the Mississippi River, seeking untapped ecosystems.
A hundred years later, as the twentieth century dawned, our country was down to around five million deer. Then we began to scale back farmland and build up suburbs. Deer love edges where grasses bump against forests, which means suburbs and old farmland are a heaven for deer. Today, in some suburban areas, ten square miles may now host a thousand deer, journalist Ben Goldfarb notes in his excellent book Crossings—double the precolonial figure. In The Age of Deer, Howsare tacks their resurgence: Halfway through the twentieth century, the deer population had surged to 20 million, she notes; by century’s end, it had reached 38 million.
The obvious question—especially given the damage they do—is how many deer is the right amount. But that’s impossible to answer, at least without delineation of what you mean by “right.” The massive herds that the first colonists found may be a flawed baseline; disease and warfare were causing a collapse in human populations, Howsare notes, and therefore a sudden flourishing of wildlife.
When confronted with farmers complaining about damage to their crops, a Georgia biologist suggested that the problem may be more psychological than real. The complaints correlate not with deer population, but with the farm economy, rising even as deer populations hold steady but the damage costs farmers more. As for the DVC deaths, they’re plenty real. But for every human death there are thousands of more deer dying. “Maybe the reality is that human beings have no particular right to move through the landscape as quickly as we do,” Howsare notes.
Goldbard notes in passing some potential solutions. So many collisions happen in the gloaming hour, as twilight settles—so decrease nighttime driving, and you decrease deaths. And time, these days, is a construct: one study suggests that switching permanently to Daylight Saving Time could save the lives of 33 drivers, and 36,000 deer, each year. Introducing predators is already making an impact, saving $11 million a year in Wisconsin. Even without solving the problem, Howsare decides to reorient toward the deer in her life, inspired by a man she meets, who, after a collision, took home the dead deer. He ate the meat. He tanned the hide. Both acts were illegal. “I can only imagine how different all of this felt,” Howsare writes, “compared to my own experience of meekly, guiltily driving away.”
Alongside as many as 2,000 wild turkeys.
Georgia was, apparently, the sole exception. Flores does not explain the reason why; if anyone is familiar with this history, I’d love to know more.