(The following article by Bobby Cleveland appeared in the Mississippi Clarion Ledger Newspaper October 8, 2004.
Jill Rogers was waiting for a light to change on Madison Colony Pathway around 8 a.m., thumping the steering wheel in tune with the radio when something offbeat caught her attention. "I couldn’t believe it, but out of nowhere came three deer. I guess a momma and her young’uns, walking right in front of me,” said Rogers, 41, of Madison. "l swear it was like they were crossing with the light, like they knew what green meant. “It was unreal. There were about 10 cars stopped and we watched them cross the road and walk into the woods.” Rogers had just dropped off her two children at school last week and was headed south into Jackson to work. I’ve seen a lot of deer on highways and country roads, but that was weird,"she said. Rogers eerie contact with wildlife is a common occurrence in the metro area and other towns throughout Mississippi, a state that has almost as many deer---biologists estimate around 2 million, and increasing---as it does hunts (2.8 million in Census 2000). With deer hunting season upon us, Mississippians can expect more such encounters as
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hunting pressure often forces deer from the woods and into our lives. While a lot of people consider an occasional sighting of deer a pleasure, others do not, especially those whose encounters involve a vehicle. The peak season for deer-automobile accidents is approaching. Winter naturally increases deer movement, because:
• Natural food sources diminish, increasing stress on deer who must find other sources.
• The genetic makeup of deer dictates that males, especially year-old bucks, must disperse from established populations.
• Later in winter, there’s the rut (deer reproductive season) when deer have something else on their minds.
'Deer not only survive...but can actually thrive'
"The adult doe is more prone to stick it out in an urban pocket, but the bucks will naturally disperse,” said Randy Spencer, a biologist with the Mississippi Department of Wildlife. Fisheries and Parks, ‘When they do in an urban environment, there’s really nowhere for them to go where they won’t encounter man .Mississippi doesn't keep an official count on deer-auto collisions. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety estimates that deer- vehicle collisions cause more than $1.1 billion per year in the United States. As deer, which biologists call one of nature’s most adaptable animals, adjust to their new surrounding , they can become quite urban. While it’s doubtful they will ever learn to read traffic lights, they do know how to survive.
They will follow creeks, utility power line rights of way and other corridors, often moving deeper into developed areas, finding homes in small patches of woods inside incorporated limits, many within 100 yards of subdivisions. “Deer not only survive in those situations, but can actually thrive,” Spencer said. “Suburbs are naturally productive and therefore attractive to deer. If they have cover to hide in during the day they can find plenty of food at night in nutritious shrubs and unfortunately, in gardens where people have spent a lot of time developing flowers. ”Mississippi has one of the country’s most dense deer herds, rebuilt through conservation in the 20th century. That century started with a national population of deer estimated at about 500,000. Mississippi, alone, now has four times that many. Hunters legally harvest about 335,000 deer in the state each year and illegal hunting and car collisions account for another 50,000. That’s still under 400,000 deer removed each year, a number biologists say is not enough to keep the deer population in check in Mississippi. “The general rule of thumb now is that with a healthy deer herd you need to remove 40 to 50 percent of the population each year to keep it from growing,” Spencer said, “In areas with a (not-so-healthy) herd, 30 percent is thought to be enough. Hunters account for about 83 percent of the deer kills, but hunting isn’t allowed in most urban areas. There, deer colonies that get established face little pressure other than traffic when they choose to eat the greener grass on the other side of the road. Problems related to urban deer are not limited to Mississippi. Spencer said the upper Midwest and the Northeast have it worse. “Some of those cities have had to institute special archery hunts to reduce the deer population in urban areas,” Spencer said. “Done properly, and managed closely, these hunts work. “It’s a situation that, quite honestly, more municipalities should consider. They will have to decide which is more unpalatable, seeing an archer kill a deer or see the results of an auto accident that involves a fatality.” It’s possible that organized hunts may be a future option for some Mississippi cities, too, since as Spencer said, urban wildlife is a situation that won’t go away and probably only get worse. Deer in the metro area could be encountered most any place. But, it’s mostly the tight spaces between developed areas — between Byram, Jackson and Clinton, between Brandon, Flowood and Ross Barnett Reservoir and between Jackson, Madison and Ridgeland — where they can be regularly seen.
By the numbers (1.7 million Deer population in Mississipppi-2.8 million Mississippi residents)
