Oh Deer

Out in our neck of the woods we’ve been increasingly faced with incursions of deer, the last few years. Their numbers and audacity seem to have grown immensely. A century ago they were held in check by big predators like wolves, coyotes, and wildcats; but humans drove them out, so the deer now ramble quite freely. A few decades ago numerous hunters roamed these woods with rifles and played the primary role of deer population-control predator. But each year these woods see fewer hunters and more deer. The automobile may soon become the sole predator.

Deer love to eat the things that people grow: luscious vegetables, fruit trees, ornamentals. These fancy plants are far tastier than tough forest vegetation. Deer may be cute, but they can be pests.

We have been quite lucky not to have been too bothered by deer in recent years—even though many of our neighbors have been. We’ve always had good-sized dogs as members of the family. They’ve roamed the immediate area, spread their scent, and enjoyed a good deer chase.

But that luck has recently been changing. Maybe it’s the increased deer population, maybe it’s the current dog getting older and more sedentary, maybe it’s all the luscious apple saplings I’ve planted. We’ve repeatedly been invaded by deer, with the buggers nibbling off the tender tips of the saplings. Their pruning technique is not to my liking. After some research and a few false starts, I’ve come up with a repellant that does a pretty good job—a noxious blend of raw egg, milk, vegetable oil, liquid soap, and cayenne powder. The sour milk and rotten egg turn my stomach, but I believe that the hot pepper bothers them most. The vegetable garden has yet to be invaded, but how much longer?

There is a worse problem than the deer nibbling our plants, however: Lyme disease. This scary malady is caused by an adaptive little germ—the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb)—that is carried by the deer tick. The tick sequentially attaches itself to field mice, humans, and deer, in that order. We—in the middle—suffer from the disease; the animals don’t. The germ must accomplish that triple-host journey, riding in the gut of the tick and pulling off the unlikely stunt of getting transferred to its current mammalian host and then back to subsequent generations of the tick. Unfortunately, Bb is very successful in meeting the challenge.

The germ’s incredibly complex journey once was rare, but is progressively more common. Humans and deer cross paths more frequently, as people have moved farther out into the exurbs. Lyme disease is nasty. But it’s certain that we’re likely to see more of it in the near future, as we rub shoulders with an escalating deer population. I think I’d rather deal with apple sapling nibbles.