WhiteTailedDeer_SuburbanHome_Hewitt_David_KingsvilleTX_25May2024_Reel4207.mp3

David Hewitt [00:00:00] Deer in particular are highly adaptable.

David Hewitt [00:00:03] And if they figure out that people aren't out to try to kill them, which in national parks and suburbs, you know, there's no reason to run from a person every time they see him. In fact, the deer that spend all their time running from people in those situations, probably don't eat very much and probably aren't very healthy. And the ones that just say, "Ehh, these people aren't a big deal, they're, they're the ones that are healthy and are making babies and raising their babies, being comfortable around people.

David Hewitt [00:00:29] And so, you end up with these deer herds that are, again, because of the adaptability, are just really comfortable in this totally novel environment.

David Hewitt [00:00:37] We do a lot of things in our suburbs that take some country that may not be great deer habitat, or may be marginal, and we probably make it pretty good deer habitat. We water it. Grass is not a good deer food, but if you water it and mow it, and it's always in a real, kind of young, growing stage, it's actually really good deer food.

David Hewitt [00:00:58] We plant plants, you know, shrubs. And talk about these forms, well, a lot of those forbs, we call them weeds, but we also call them wildflowers. And so, we're planting wildflowers in our gardens around our houses. And we actually make some really good deer habitat in these suburbs.

David Hewitt [00:01:14] And we've taken a lot of the predation risks away. There can be coyotes wandering through our neighborhoods at night, but probably not as many as on the rangelands. Cougars aren't going to be able to exist a lot in our neighborhoods. You know, they're, they're pretty well excluded. And, and we don't have hunters.

David Hewitt [00:01:31] And so, yeah, from a deer standpoint, it's actually a pretty good situation.

David Hewitt [00:01:35] And so, these deer do what deer do: they make a lot of babies. And you get more and more deer.

David Hewitt [00:01:40] And now all of a sudden you've got situations where you've got problems, because now it's not one cute deer in the yard that I see once a week. And this is a neat way to interact with nature. This is really cool.

David Hewitt [00:01:52] Now you've got 15 deer bedded in the yard every day, and they're all out looking for something to eat, and you can't keep any of your landscaping. They're eating all the shrubs. They're eating all the tomatoes off the tomato plants, whatever.

David Hewitt [00:02:04] So, so now we've got conflict.

David Hewitt [00:02:06] People are hitting them with their cars. Female deer with fawns sometimes can get aggressive. And so, you actually do have some deer attacks. Bucks during the rut, when they've got what I call testosterone poisoning, they've lost their ... they've got one thing on their mind and it's to go out and find a doe to breed. And they've lost a lot of their fear.

David Hewitt [00:02:27] And so there can be some situations where deer could actually be dangerous to people.

David Hewitt [00:02:31] Could be some disease concerns with ticks and Lyme disease, you know, those kind of things, with real high deer densities.

David Hewitt [00:02:37] So, so there's a variety of reasons why we probably don't want super-high deer densities in our suburban areas and in our national parks and state parks and things like that.

David Hewitt [00:02:47] So, now we're to a place where we need to control these deer. And that's where we get into just as many of these different passions and ways that people feel deer should be managed as, as we've got with hunting and free-ranging deer.

David Hewitt [00:03:03] You know, some people think, "Yeah, man, if I could go brain that deer right now that's eating my bush, I would go out and do it." And it may be a little old lady with a frying pan.

David Hewitt [00:03:11] And then there's other people that are just super passionate about it: "No, these deer have a right to be here. I'm the intruder. We need to adjust to the deer, and doing anything to those deer would be way out of bounds."

David Hewitt [00:03:23] So, so you'll have these city managers and Texas Parks and Wildlife trying to negotiate around all those, those really strong passions of managing these, these kind of urban / suburban deer.