A Naif in the Forest by Darrell Berger

Wing Tips to Hiking Boots: Musings of a New, Full-Time Poconos Resident 

Everybody here has photographs of deer. We have seen as many as seven traveling together. The dogs run themselves to joyful exhaustion in their futile but determined chases. 

Our deer are white tails, the most widely distributed large animal from Canada to Peru. Males grow and shed their antlers annually, according to individual hormone cycles. There is no “shedding season.” Antler tissue is the fastest-growing tissue known, as much as one inch per day. 

White tail deer are matriarchal; mothers lead with offspring and males following. They reach speeds of forty miles per hour and can cruise at twenty-five. They are strong swimmers, can clear a fence nine feet high and a stream twenty-five feet wide. This is no surprise to anyone who has tried to keep them from their garden. 

They are prodigious eaters. They are a ruminant with a four-chambered stomach and eat five to ten pounds of food a day from a very wide and diverse menu. Thus these beautiful, shy and sensitive creatures are also pests. We have carefully tried to plant flowers and bushes that deer don’t find delicious, and it isn’t easy. We have also built high and sturdy fences around our vegetable garden. 

Plants and bushes of the forest have no such protection. Our ground cover has a fraction of the diversity and resilience one would find in a well-balanced ecology. Deer season has a worthy environmental goal in addition to sporting and commercial motivations. 

Deer came even closer to our home when we lived in a New Jersey suburb where a nature preserve was close but no hunting allowed. When some hunting was contemplated due to the increase in the herd, the strategy was met with resistance, controversy and limited success. While hunting here seems natural, hunting in a densely populated suburb is problematic. 

Deer over-population is a good example of how hard it is to solve local environmental problems locally.  When your problem runs forty miles per hour, jumps nine feet and eats ten pounds of the forest and your garden every day, it is even harder.