A Deer Runs Through It
White-tailed deer. Photo by Marko Hankkila/Unsplash.
Nine miles off the coast of southern New England, on an idyllic island with shrubby bluffs that shelter a staggering number of migrating songbirds each fall, I once found myself at odds with an unexpected nemesis.
I lived and worked on Block Island for two months in the fall of 2013, studying its migrating songbirds for my doctoral research. But, to paraphrase The Music Man, I also found trouble––Trouble with a capital T, and that rhymes with D, and that stands for...deer.
White-tailed deer were introduced to Block Island in the late 1960s, and their population quickly grew in the absence of predators. Voracious appetites for both native and ornamental plants and a disregard for traffic safety make abundant deer populations problematic in many places, even where they haven’t been introduced.
During my field season on Block Island, I found them to be four-legged, dewy-eyed, white-tailed saboteurs. I swear these deer were out to get me.
First, they kept wrecking my equipment.
A mist net opened at dawn on Block Island in 2013.
On the northeastern tip of the island, in a patch of exquisite shrubby habitat ideal for migrating songbirds, I set a series of mist nets––large panels of fine, delicate mesh perfect for gently capturing birds for study and release (with permits, of course). The nets are designed to be nearly invisible––that’s why songbirds fly into them.
In places with lots of deer, however, the nets’ invisibility becomes a liability: A scampering deer will blast right through one like a hot knife through butter, leaving a characteristic, draping hole like the outline of a cartoon character in a brick wall.
I set nine nets that season, and the island’s abundant deer plowed through most of them, often multiple times.
If that weren’t bad enough, they then brought their shenanigans literally to my doorstep.
While working solo on the island, I also lived alone––in a small cottage owned by The Nature Conservancy. The cottage was a very pleasant home away from home for the two months of my stay, and one of its charms was a sprawling apple tree by the front door.
My fieldwork home in September and October 2013, its apple tree laden with fruit.
I did not realize, however, that deer apparently are obsessed with apples. Especially, it seems, juicy, overripe, fermenting ones that have fallen to the ground, sweet and soft and easy to reach.
Quite soon after my arrival, the deer began to throw nightly parties under this apple tree, leaving heaps of droppings, like landmines, on the lawn for me to avoid in the morning. And, often, in sudden fits of high-strung frivolity, they would kick the cottage walls.
I am not kidding.
After the autumn sun had set, and I was alone in the cottage, finishing up my dinner or getting ready for bed, all would seem peaceful and calm outside in the abyssal darkness...until––BANG!––a deer would careen into my wall, making me jump and swear in fright.
Cavorting on the lawn one night, one even put a hoof through the screen of the cottage’s front door. (Facepalm.)
The afternoons and evenings I spent mending my nets, I’ll admit, were not unpleasant. Lugging a stool and the repair kit out through the net lanes, I’d sit quietly by an offending deer hole and just let my mind and senses wander as my fingers worked to (as seamlessly as possible) weave the mesh back together. It was in these quiet hours, performing this relatively mindless task, that I’d notice the calls of frogs or pheasants, or watch the colors of shadows change under a setting sun.
After a deer ripped the screen of my front door, I repaired that too, with the very same kit I used to mend my nets. Rather than frogs or pheasants that evening, the accompaniment to my net repair was an elegant live band, whose strains carried down the hill from the Victorian-era Atlantic Inn. There are worse ways to spend an hour.
The Block Island deer, nevertheless, made a lasting impression that field season––not only on my nets or the cottage screen door, but on me. They really don’t belong on the island, and there have been efforts to try to manage them.
As long as they’re there in numbers, it’s pretty much guaranteed that any mist net, or screen door luckless enough to have an apple tree nearby, will have a deer run through it.