I read that Illinois hunters killed 52,000 deer in the first weekend of the season, and that’s just those using firearms; the muzzleloaders and spear-throwers have yet to get their crack at the state’s whitetails. And vehicle drivers have an open season on deer all year round; collisions on the roads account for another 15,000 or so animals each year. That’s good, but we can do better.
Springfield and deer go way back. “Elisha Kelly, who came on foot, found that the Sangamon country was a hunter’s paradise,” wrote Robert P. Howard in A New Eden. “A disciple of Daniel Boone, he was one of the hunter-traders who lived alone in the wilderness on a wild game diet. . . . [H]e roamed through the Sangamon Valley, gun in hand. Then he returned to North Carolina full of chamber of commerce talk about this new Eden.” Beef cattle were raised to be sold; the people who raised them lived on hunted venison, and deerskins were so widely used in barter hereabouts that they constituted a currency.
Springfield doesn’t have much of a deer problem today, probably because deer have been reading about aldermanic government and moved north. That is perhaps the only unambiguous progress the city has made in 200 years. Deer have become pestilential across Illinois’ northern counties. In the North Shore suburb of Highland Park, some 30,000 people share space with 150 white-tailed deer. That might not seem like a big herd exactly, unless you are a garden or a woods or a driver, thanks to what Highland Park officials delicately describe as “negative human-deer interactions.” In the 1990s, when it was at its most dense, the local deer population used to average 10-12 animals per square mile. (The equivalent in Springfield would be maybe 700 deer.) Five deer per mile is ideal.
The animals infest the lakeside ravines of that town, which are rich in food and shelter for whitetails. Nor are they bothered by predators; a dog in that part of Highland Park would no more chase down his own deer than its owner would mow his own lawn. In consequence, the deer behave like trust-fund brats, being smug and entitled and ever so slightly stupid. One encounters them even in broad daylight, usually in someone’s garden or munching on an English yew. The local deer are cherished by some as living lawn ornaments, and I suspect that the deer are conscious of this condescension. How else to explain the sullen resentment deer display as they saunter ever so slowly across a road in front of cars?
I lived for a few years in suburban California, in a subdivision that backed onto wooded hills filled with mule deer. At night they migrated into the neighborhood to feed. They chewed my lily of the Nile to the ground, and daintily nibbled the tips of new leaves of my Pittosporum tobira, and added insult to injury by leaving their crap all over my sidewalk. It was like having a college student home for vacation. I tried the old home remedy of spreading human urine around the plants but it didn’t work, maybe because the olfactory sense of the local deer is muddled by the chlorine fumes wafting from all the swimming pools.
Deer in the suburbs are harder to get rid of than Democrats in the House. Down in Mt. Vernon a few years ago, it was proposed that bow hunters be allowed to take deer within city limits to reduce the deer traffic hazard. In the 1990s Highland Park tried catching excess deer and releasing them in Peoria. Sending a North Shore deer to Peoria was cruelty itself, and I would not be surprised if that year an unexpectedly high number of deer stepped in front of trucks on Peoria roads. Highland Park then asked voters if they would mind if professional hunters were allowed to shoot a few. A narrow majority said yes, and sharpshooters bagged 20 animals, but shooting high-powered rifles in those select residential areas makes people nervous; even an ace shot might miss and hit a caterer or a decorator. So in 2011 Highland Park successfully tried eugenics instead, through the surgical sterilization of doe whitetails.
They use more emphatic methods of population control out West, where the remains of deer dot the mountain highways. “Remains” is the word, too, as they are less like deer carcasses and more like deer litter; a full-grown doe hit at 70 miles an hour by a Peterbilt rigged with a Mad Max grill guard isn’t crushed, it explodes.
Sometimes, however, the deer are the truck. While walking along a creek bottom in California I was nearly T-boned by a young buck stampeding toward cover across my path from behind the corner of a privacy fence. Something had spooked him – probably a developer proposing to build a three-story apartment building and thus turn that corner of Paradise into Manhattan. On this occasion the buck passed me, but next time, who knows? So I say to Illinois’ brave huntsmen: Aim steady and fire true. It’s us or them.
Contact James Krohe Jr. at KroJnr@gmail.com.
This article appears in Dec 11-17, 2014.
