The first time I saw deer inside the Salida city limits, it was a charming anomaly. Some muley had wandered into town and would doubtless wander out, and wasn’t it wonderful that we lived so close to nature and all that. But that was years ago, and now, to say you saw some deer in town is about like saying you saw a fire hydrant or a realty office.
Visitors are sometimes impressed, though. Back in the 1990s, I was chatting with the director of the local chamber of commerce on a December afternoon, and she said she didn’t have a good answer for a Virginia tourist who asked her how the town arranged to have all those reindeer running around just before Christmas, adding to the holiday spirit, for he would like his own town to host a similar promotion.
Alas, our mule deer do not return to the North Pole after Christmas. They’re around all year, trotting across streets and devouring gardens. And there’s no way to handle them that is going to please everyone.
Consider the “don’t do anything” approach, which means leaving the critters alone to be fruitful and multiply. Deer are woefully ignorant of traffic regulations. They bolt out into the street. They get maimed or killed, and every year, about 200 motorists nationwide die as a result of collisions with deer.
Further, deer can be deadly all on their own. They can stomp, gore or bite pedestrians. Numbers are hard to come by here, but it has been known to happen. Martha came home quite shaken on a recent evening. She’d been walking the dog along the railroad tracks when a doe came out of the brush and threatened to charge her. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said, “because I sure couldn’t outrun it.”
The deer ended the standoff by taking off after the dog, who had bravely decided to run away. The dog returned in a few minutes without the deer.
Another danger is that where there are deer, there are mountain lions. The people who think it’s mellow and cute to have Bambi in the yard may not feel the same way about pumas, but one inevitably leads to the other. There’s an excellent book about this relationship in Colorado, “The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature,” by David Baron.
He points out that as deer multiplied on Boulder’s open space, the state Division of Wildlife proposed hunting to thin the herd. Boulderites opposed that, so cougars moved in. And cougars have killed people.
Other cities have been more broad-minded than Boulder. In the San Luis Valley, Alamosa just hosted a special hunting season to thin its troublesome municipal deer herd. One deer wandered into a house in October, a buck shattered a bank window in December, and at least a dozen deer charged through a crowd at a football game last fall.
The hunt was held at the golf course. The city required hunters to pass a marksmanship test. Only two muzzle-loaders passed, and they got no game, but the archers killed 11 deer during February.
Did it reduce the problem, though? Persuade the deer to migrate to safer ground? “No, not really,” according to the woman I talked to at city hall on Monday. “When I was driving to work this morning, there were six deer that bolted across the street in front of me.”
Deer, of course, aren’t the only troublesome large herbivores. An Estes Park correspondent tells me that members of the growing elk herd have figured out how to climb the steps to her deck, which “comes as a shock” since she and her husband had felt safe there for years.
Reducing the elk population will be tricky, since it’s illegal to hunt in nearby Rocky Mountain National Park, a haven for elk – which are also a major tourist attraction, especially during bugling season.
In Salida, deer were rare 25 years ago, but dogs ran all over town. The city cracked down on dogs, and now we have deer. That inverse relationship seems to hold in Leadville, where the local newspaper carries many dog complaints, but few if any complaints about deer.
But turning the dogs loose brings its own problems, sometimes lethal. In 1977, a toddler was killed by roaming dogs in Summit County.
It appears that we will have trouble no matter what we do about the big game among us. And if we don’t do anything, we’ll still have trouble. I’d rather not have to carry a .357 to walk to the post office, just in case a deer-attracted cougar wants some dietary variety, but it may come to that.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
