Heart racing, I hold my breath and brace to witness the impact.
The spindly fawn crosses first, tottering its way across the two-lane artery that borders my house. I watch a truck approaching in the opposite direction and wait for it to slow down. Will it?
The doe waits until the last moment, deciding the best time to cross the road is when the truck is almost upon her. She darts out, her white tail raised high in alarm.
The bay window where I curl up with my dog and a good book happens to provide the perfect vantage point for near-miss carnage on a daily basis. I don’t even have to watch to know what’s happening. Sometimes I hear the screeching of brakes, a honking horn. I know how it ends: a deer limping around with its leg at an awkward angle, a carcass piled unceremoniously on the side of the road.
From where I sit in Missoula, Montana, we have a tenuous-at-best existence with urban deer: hitting them with our cars, bothering them with our dogs and grumbling when they eat our garden vegetables. This is true throughout the country, from West Virginia to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Deer can live pretty much anywhere with food, water and cover to hide from predators .
White-tailed deer, hunted to near-extinction in the 19th century, have staged an impressive comeback. Their overabundance is now considered a nuisance and, to some, even a crisis. One Audubon New York forest manager said the organization considered surging deer populations, which eat all the shrubs and tree seedlings in sight, as bad for eastern forest birds’ habitat as the climate crisis. Scientists from the National Park Service agree: too many deer are an “impending disaster”.
Deer in dense urban areas may have all they need to be perfectly content with a home range the size of eight blocks, said Travis Gallo, a professor of urban ecology and conservation at the University of Maryland. Gallo and his team have spent two field seasons hanging out in parks in the middle of the night, attaching GPS collars to deer. He’s currently working to overlay their movements with cellphone data, pinpointing exactly where the lives of humans and deer meet.
Living in our midst, deer do their best to adapt to our rhythms. But that’s not always a foolproof way to minimize conflict. Human collisions with deer increase by 16% in the week following the autumn clock change marking the end of daylight saving time, according to a 2022 report in the journal Current Biology. The time switch leads to peak traffic volumes shifting from before sunset to after sunset, putting commuters and deer together in the dark. Researchers estimate that year-round daylight saving time would prevent more than 36,000 deer deaths, 33 human deaths and thousands of injuries to both parties.
I wonder if there is a better way to live alongside deer in all their forms: cute neighborhood critter, garden pest, even reservoirs for Covid-19 and tick-borne diseases. Have any communities cracked the code?
The booming Utah city of Eagle Mountain is a good place to start. Rapid development in recent years isn’t usually good for deer. “In housing humans, we evict deer,” author Ben Goldfarb wrote in High Country News. Research from 2016 found that residential housing development is actually worse for mule deer populations in Colorado than oil and gas development.
But rather than steamroll wildlife, public officials have taken a decidedly deer-friendly approach. Deer-friendly ordinances are written into zoning codes and transportation plans, which require wildlife crossings over new roads and that developers install deer-friendly fencing and lighting in certain designated habitat areas. No new construction is allowed on ridgelines and in seasonal washes, and the town is one of few with a municipal wildlife biologist.
More than 20 miles (32km) of tall fences are being built, even before the neighborhoods around them spring up, to shepherd migratory deer. A protected corridor will guide deer directly through dense subdivisions, with room to eat and sleep, too.
It’s a stunningly proactive approach and a chance most existing cities will never have to do things right the first time.
Humans are trying to guide deer and other wildlife over and under our infrastructure in other ways, too. Wildlife crossings have been gaining steam since the 1950s, with projects in the works or recently finished in Washington, Colorado and more. The world’s largest wildlife crossing will open next year in southern California, spanning 10 lanes of traffic.
Elsewhere in the US, city officials are trying to co-exist with deer by keeping their populations in check. Deer thrive in our neighborhoods, where our presence often means limited predators and never-ending meals of ornamental plants, gardens and bird feeders. It’s kind of paradise – minus the cars. “Road mortalities are the biggest threat to them,” Gallo said. “So attracting them into neighborhoods, deliberately or accidentally, puts them in danger.”
Staten Island in New York City, where city officials are paying experts millions to catch and administer the ungulate version of a vasectomy, is at the forefront. The city’s deer vasectomy program began in 2016, and it appears to be working: the parks department said in 2024 that deer populations were down by almost 50%. Deer collisions have also declined substantially, as have sightings of black-legged ticks, which spread Lyme disease and other diseases. But cervid birth control isn’t cheap: keeping the program running through 2029 will cost $2.5m.
Perhaps a more common way to control urban deer populations is through urban hunts. Too many deer in an area can eat themselves out of house and home, nibbling vegetation before it can ever grow back. That happened in Rock Creek Park, 1,700 acres (688 hectares) of leafy refuge in the middle of Washington DC. Trained biologists with the National Park Service have been strategically killing deer there, under the cover of night with silenced weapons, since 2013. With fewer deer, the park’s seedling density has more than doubled.
In the suburbs of Washington, trained hunters can use a bow and arrows to kill deer with homeowners’ permission. Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and towns throughout Arkansas have similar programs – archers are chosen by a lottery system to hunt deer, which often number in the 300s per sq mile.
Gallo said that, scientifically, he supports culling programs as an innovative, creative approach to balancing ecosystems. I struggle with the idea of full-throated approval, and I know I’m not alone in that hesitancy. It feels wrong to lay out an all-you-can-eat buffet, then punish deer for taking advantage of it.
A pilot urban deer-hunting program in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was supposed to start in January. But opposition from residents, mostly concerned about the fate of their children, not the deer, postponed the pilot until at least the fall.
I hate seeing deer scamper across the road. But I love finding them sleeping in my side yard as silent houseguests. Their tawny bodies lay curled up only a few feet from where I lay swaddled in my own bed. “This is the way wild animals mostly live among us,” opinion writer Margaret Renkl wrote in the New York Times. “They are right there, crouched under a bush, curled up beneath a toolshed, tucked next to the trunk of an evergreen.”
Sometimes I startle them when I go outside to start my car in the winter. I stumble across them on my daily dog walks, too. I love watching them pull crab apples off trees in the fall and warily eye me with big black eyes when I walk by. I love knowing they’re there. And I hate watching them almost get hit by cars on a daily basis.
I want to say I’m sorry. Sorry for growing tantalizing food in my backyard and fencing it off. Sorry for my dog spooking you on walks. Sorry for being right there, in your way just as much as you are in mine.
