Urban Deer - Risks to Humans

Have just returned from a great trip out to very western most part of Canada. We got as far as Tofino on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island after visiting friends along the way. I also did a talk on various things related to wildlife for the Victoria Academy of Veterinary Medicine. Most present were small animal practitioners, but there were a few wildlife rehab folks there as well. I may have surprised some of the attendees by suggesting that the feeding of urban deer is simply a bad thing.

Of course it is bad for the humans in several ways.

Perhaps the mildest ”bad” is that the deer eat people’s gardens. Not just veggies, but also ornamental flowers. Most of our friends on the island have erected deer-proof fences and on the offshore Saltspring Island I think everyone has done the same.

Another concern is the potential for Lyme disease to crop up in humans. Here is an authoritative site about it. The deer do not carry the disease itself, but they do carry the ticks that spread it. The more deer, potentially the more ticks. There were ten reported cases of this nasty condition in humans in British Columbia in 2011.

Traffic accidents are of course a major hazard. There are YouTube videos to show it. 

Habituated or tame deer can be very dangerous. The females are especially so when they have very young fawns.  In this clip shown on TV news, a doe attacks a pet dog in the Victoria suburb of Sannich. Imagine if that had been a toddler.

Dr. Jay Rolfe, whom I had not seen since his graduation from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine about 25 years ago, related how a doe had emerged from hiding and flattened a young 18-year old male. In the city of Fairbanks, Alaska, a cow moose attacked and killed a pedestrian.  Newly calved wapiti are very aggressive and are a real hazard in Jasper National park. They seem to view dogs with great dislike and will attack them. I am convinced that small children (say under ten) are seen as potential predators.

If does are potential bad news rutting stags or bulls of any member of the deer family become incredibly dangerous during the rut. Each fall there are reports of so-called tame deer, usually white-tailed deer, changing almost overnight from “stroke-my-nose-please, I-love-it” to crazy killers hell-bent of destruction. One client of mine was treed for several hours by such a buck after it hit him from behind. He was lucky to escape up a nearby poplar with torn jeans and some dramatic bruises. 

As the person who posted this YouTube video wrote:

This is video of the elk rut in Estes Park, CO in the fall of 2009. The elk are in a frenzy, and don't care about people around! 

If that shows how things can get wild with non-imprinted cervids, this story shows how things may turn out.

I wrote this in Of Moose and Men.

My own scary experience with an enraged “tame” bull occurred with three hundred kilos of mind-bent, testosterone-crazed, but luckily de-antlered wapiti. He was part of a research group that I had been working with for several months. I used to visit them almost daily but had missed seeing them over the first weekend in September. On the Monday morning I entered the pen without taking due note of the changes that had happened. The bull came straight for me and pinned me against one of the uprights in a corner of the yard. As long as I stood fairly still he simply leaned on me, albeit with some force, pressing my back against the post so that I could feel each of my vertebrae creating a dent in the wood. If I tried to move he leaned a bit more—quite a bit more. I wondered if I was ever going to get out of this mess, but luckily I was with one of my students, who was outside the pen, and so I called out to him to help me. He had the presence of mind to grab a handy length of two-by-four, lean around the nearby gatepost, and give the bull a good thump on the rump. Happily the bull turned to face this new threat, giving me a chance to break the world’s standing high-jump record over the three-metre fence.

The student was Jay Rolfe, but I had failed to catch up with him before publication of the book and felt I could not use his name without his permission.  He certainly saved me from some serious injury and may have saved my life.

This sharp testosterone peak is central to the whole business of the rut and in this graph that I developed almost 30 years ago from work I did on wapiti (North American elk) I show how quickly it happens.
 
In wapiti the jump takes place about the beginning of September. In other species the date changes, but not the event. If you look closely at the scale you will see that this is a log scale. There would not be room on this page to show the actual rise in real numbers. It is about 1000 fold!

It is not just tame animals that will become aggressive. On the eleventh tee of the beautiful Lobstick golf course in Prince Albert National park a bull wapiti once took over the ground. Wise golfers used ”local rules” and teed up a hundred or so yards down the fairway. I don’t know if the scores for the shortened hole improved, but I doubt it. Golfers would have had heightened excitement levels after a meeting like that. The steadiness needed to play god golf might have been suspended.

I shall explore how the development of an urban deer culture, and especially the feeding of urban deer is an animal welfare issue in my next post.

Canoeing in Prince Albert NP

Linkhttp://www.pc.gc.ca/pn-np/sk/princealbert/index_e.asp

Just back from a wonderful canoe cum fishing trip in Canada’s Prince Albert National Park. We chose to make a circular trip through what is known as the Bagwa route. The sunset across the lake was reward in itself.

The trip involves a two-hour paddle across the western side of Kingsmere Lake, one of the largest in the park, a quiet trip for forty minutes or so up a shallow, weed-filled channel into Bagwa Lake and an overnight stop there after hopefully catching a supper’s worth of walleye, known more commonly as pickerel.

From here it was to be a short glide through Lily lake, a portage around the base of a slight rise, some more fishing (for Northern Pike, also known by several derogatory names such as slough shark and hammer handle in Claire and another portage, this time across a board walk over a swamp, back into Kingsmere and base camp at South End.

We had first done the trip over thirty years ago and it is a real pleasure to be able to relate that little has changed in the area over that longish gap. The campsites have improved, with much better places to put ones food, and no garbage. The bear-proof food caches are about 15 feet up on platforms that have metal-clad legs, to prevent sharp claws from getting a grip, and have ladders up to them that can be pulled away. I have never seen a bear climb a ladder, but you never know.

The first leg was a huge success. The wind, what there was of it, had no negative effect on the canoe. Kingsmere can be dangerous, turning from millpond to maelstrom in moments when strong winds blow, but we skimmed across and had the added bonus of landing three nice lake trout as we went. The Bagwa channel was gorgeous. The water lilies had just begun to open their buds and yellow balls dotted the water surface. There were mallards galore, lots of grebes, and small flotillas of pelicans sailing along. More pelicans planed down in tight formation to join them.

On that first trip we had sat on a beaver lodge and watched enthralled as a moose cow and her calf swam towards us. We only moved when it became obvious that she wanted to exit on the lodge that as our viewpoint and that there really was not enough room for both groups. She had turned aside and landed about thirty metres down from us, stopping briefly to take a disdainful look at us. This time there were no moose, but we did see three white-tailed deer, one of them a buck in velvet, walking along the lakeshore with a complete lack of concern.

There was one sour note, as a motorboat roared up the channel and into the lake, stopping for the night away from the official campsite. Bagwa, and even its entrance channel, are off limits to motors, and there can be no doubt that the people in the craft, tow men, were there to catch pickerel. If they had disregarded the motor rules, how many pickerel above their limit did they take out?

We forgot the intrusion as we fell asleep to the manic cries of loons and the cackling of grebes

The pickerel fishing was as good as we remembered and so we did not complete the round-trip, with its two portages, as we guessed that a paddle out back through the channel and across a slightly more windy Kingsmere. This proved to be a good choice as we caught the last trout on our permit and came home with a limit.