Mule deer mom and half-grown fawn crossing an urban street–headed for greener pastures?
Normally when I come in from working in my yard, I smell like earth, sweat and whatever plants I’ve been working with a faint undertone of the spicy perfume I wear. Today though, I stink.
It’s not my body odor. It’s deer repellent. This particular one boasts a distinctive and quite unpleasant mixture that includes “putrescent” egg solids (and trust me, they are quite putrescent), plus dried blood, meat meal, fish oil, garlic oil, cloves, and onions. I don’t recommend it as a date-night perfume, unless you are dating the mule deer that haunt my neighborhood, in which case, spray away!
I’ve coexisted with mule deer for the past 17 years in the little town in the southern Rocky Mountains that I call home. I know them pretty well and I’m fairly resigned to their presence and their diets. For years, they ignored my formerly industrial block, preferring the green-lawn/rosebush/tulip blossom forage of more well-watered neighborhoods.
Until the mild drought our region was in turned serious about three years ago. That same year, one of my neighbors began throwing out stale white rolls on his front lawn so his wife could watch “the birds.”
Young mule deer buck with one antler waits in the alley for the evening’s serving of junk food.
The rolls were too big for most birds, but you know who came to eat them: the mule deer, which congregated in his yard by the dozen. Feeding deer is illegal in Colorado, in part because it sets up just the right conditions to spread horrific diseases like Chronic Wasting Disease and in part because where deer concentrate, mountain lions follow.
Too many mule deer in town are a nuisance that occasionally turns deadly. Mountain lions in town are invariably deadly–and not just to the deer.
I didn’t turn my neighbor in that first winter because I was preoccupied (my husband had brain cancer and my mother was dying). The next spring, the gimpy doe who had three usable legs after being hit by a car had triplets. So did another doe in the neighborhood; a third just had twins.
Winter mule deer herd eating everything they can find….
By the following winter, when I did call the local game warden on my deer-feeding neighbor, the neighborhood deer population was ridiculous. I got up early one morning and counted 28 mule deer in the little park next to my house. (The latest census says we have ten times as many mule deer in town as the landscape can support.)
The drought deepened. That winter we had barely any snow; the creek that runs through my neighborhood dried up.
The mule deer began eating everything, even plants they had previously shunned. They grazed the native grassland I had carefully restored on my formerly industrial half-block nearly to bare soil. My yard was paved by deer droppings.
The following spring when we finally got some moisture (in this high desert, just two inches makes a miracle happen), I thought the deer might move on. No such luck. One doe took to stashing her twin fawns right off my front porch.
One of the twins, hiding in plain sight.
Clearly, it was time for some deer behavior modification.
Not fencing; I don’t like the feeling of living in prison.I borrowed a friends’ dog, which temporarily discouraged the doe and fawns.
And I began testing deer sprays. When I found one that stank and persisted, I filled my backpack sprayer and doused the parts of the yard where the deer hung out. It wasn’t a permanent solution, I knew, but I was selling the house and its half-block of formerly industrial yard, and deer droppings and dead plants do not make for great curb appeal.
Fast-forward to this spring, when the drought is even worse (our precipitation so far this year totals 1.28 inches–yes, you read that right). Regardless, I am happily engaged in restoring a native wildflower-freckled grassland at the other end of the block around my new house, built on the last chunk of my former decaying industrial empire. So far, the tiny seedlings of wildflowers and grasses haven’t tempted the mule deer.
Yesterday, our first non-windy, mild spring day, I planted 49 perennial shrubs, grasses and wildflowers for a pollinator garden (all “deer-resistant” and mostly native species) and a rock garden.
The newly planted pollinator garden–pre deer dinner time
After I finished mattocking all of those holes (before my site was industrial, it was a riverbed, so my “soil” is about 45 percent large, rounded granite cobbles overlain with fly ash, broken concrete and road base), I was too tired to spray deer repellent.
And wouldn’t you know it, last night, the deer sampled almost every one of those plants, “deer resistant” or no. I can’t blame them. They’re starving; I planted a buffet that they won’t like particularly well once the plants are established, but right now they’re tender, nursery-watered and fertilized.
Hence today’s dousing with putrescent egg and blood perfume. Tonight, the deer won’t dine as well. I’d say I was sorry, but I’d be lying.
Now if I could just make it rain–for about a month….
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