From the top of the state to its southern tip, everyone seems to have a deer story this summer.
The I-saw-a-deer-in-the-back-yard stories. The I-almost-hit-a-deer stories. The deer-hit-my-car stories. The deer-through-the-dining-room-window stories. The deer-ate-my-cantaloupe-crop stories.
In these real-life stories, as opposed to the ever-endearing ”Bambi,”
the deer is at best a lovable, attractive nuisance, at worst a great hazard to safety, even an unwitting killer.
There is no statewide census of the deer population. There are figures from the Department of Conservation showing dramatic increases in recent years in the number of deer killed by hunters. Last year they took 56,143 in Illinois.
There are also figures from the Department of Transportation showing increasing traffic accidents involving deer and vehicles. In 1988 (the most current figures), 7,294 were reported just on state-maintained roads. There are proposals to allow bow-hunters in one state park. There are animal rights groups taking aim at the idea.
Like them or loathe them, you may meet a deer any day now. Or probably already have. Here are some of the stories told at the breakfast table, in taverns, police reports and media accounts.
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LACON-Sister Bernard Kouri, Order of St. Francis, heard the door buzzer alarm go off in the dining room of St. Joseph`s Nursing Home one quiet Sunday afternoon in this Marshall County town along the Illinois River.
The nun suspected that a resident had accidentally bumped the door. But when she checked the dining room, she found a shattered double-glass door and a bloody 2-year-old doe, berserk with pain and fear, careering around the dining hall.
”It was unbelievable,” Kouri said. ”The poor thing was running around and the more people who came into the room, the more scared it got.
”It was injured pretty badly. It ran around and messed up the area a little bit, then it lay down. When the veterinarian came, he said it had probably looked in the window, seen its reflection and thought it saw another deer,” she said.
”When he put it to sleep, the poor thing was fighting so hard. I never had heard a deer cry before. Finally, she went to sleep. There was no way of saving her.
”Our residents were shocked and concerned about the poor thing,” Kouri said. ”If it had been a normal day, one of our residents who sits by that window all the time probably would have been hit, and in another 10 or 15 minutes, that dining room probably would have been full of people.
”This happened two weeks ago, and the deer are back now. They were eating our garden last Sunday again.”
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COLCHESTER-There won`t be any home-grown cantaloupe for sale anytime soon at Griswold`s Market on Illinois Highway 136 in McDonough County in the western part of the state.
The deer ate Glenn Griswold`s entire crop. Nearly 2,000 cantaloupe plants.
”I figure about eight melons to the plant, and they would have been real early ones worth a dollar apiece,” Griswold said. ”We should be picking them right now.”
Instead, Griswold will be driving to market in St. Louis, and buying his fresh cantaloupe there for resale at his roadstand.
The Griswolds have had some problem with deer in the past, and they have tried most home remedies.
They tried hanging a pan from an electric wire, coating the pan with peanut butter, and shocking the deer away. But the deer just skipped the peanut butter after a while and went right for the fruit course.
They also tried placing propane ”cannons” in their fields with timers to set off loud blasts every 15 minutes or so, in hopes of frightening the deer away.
”It works for two or three days, and then after a while you find deer grazing right next to the cannons. They get used to them,” Griswold said.
”I once flushed a deer bedded down within 60 yards of a cannon that was going off every few minutes.”
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GALENA-Magnificent 14-point bucks that appear out of nowhere have spooked trail riders at the Shenandoah Riding Center in the Galena Territory resort community. But most are delighted to run into the deer, says operator Steve Weigel.
It`s the people in cars who have the problems.
”I know people who have hit deer with their cars four or five times out here,” Weigel said. ”Sometimes it seems like the same people hitting the same deer all the time.”
David Jansen, manager of the Territory homeowners association, said there is a car-deer accident within the 6,800-acre development once every 10 to 14 days, and the scenic valley, where hunting is not allowed, has become far more of a sanctuary for deer than for man.
Deer are ravaging the decorative plants and yards of homeowners, tearing up the greens and fairways of the two championship golf courses, crashing through windows and eating up gardens in the bucolic development, Jansen said. ”People have to separate wild deer from the Bambi concept. Every deer is not Bambi,” Jansen said. ”They are lovely to see and to watch, but too many of them will overrun our territory and do significant damage.”
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PROSPECT HEIGHTS-The young buck left the Cook County forest preserve sometime before 3 a.m. on July 23, leaped a drainage ditch, crossed Milwaukee Avenue, leaped another drainage ditch, crossed the hangar and parking area of the Pal-Waukee Airport and found its way to Runway 3-4.
A Piper Seneca in the ”roll out” stage of its landing, when it is slowing after touching down, struck the buck, estimated at 150 pounds, and killed it on the runway.
The only damage to the plane was a dent on the left wing.
The pilot was not injured, according to Dennis Rouleau, assistant manager of operations and maintenance at the airport.
”We don`t see the deer on the airport that often, but you see them all over the forest preserve,” he said.
The airport, owned by Wheeling and Prospect Heights, has already contracted to erect a 10-foot-high fence to keep the deer out.
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NORTHFIELD-Police in this affluent northern suburb of estate homes deal more with deer than criminals.
The deer steal in from the surrounding forest preserves in the night and raise havoc, said Police Chief Richard Klatzco.
But the village Police Department handled its first ”deer suicide” this spring, Klatzco said.
”That`s what one of the guys called it, anyway. A deer was on the Tower Road overpass over the Edens Expressway and when a car came at it, the deer jumped off the bridge and landed on the expressway,” Klatzco reported.
”It was a good thing it was late at night, because a lot of people could have been hurt or killed if there had been heavy traffic.”
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OREGON-Dave Stenger figured what`s good for kangaroos in New Zealand might work for white-tailed deer in the Rock River Valley of Illinois. It appears he figured right.
Five years ago, the estimated 250 deer that winter in the privately owned Sinnissippi Forest tree farm managed by Stenger destroyed 30,000 young Christmas trees.
All other remedies had failed, so Stenger went for a $25,000, high-tech electric fence developed to take the bounce out of the kangaroo herds in New Zealand.
The fence, which is partly solar-powered, has become something of a tourist attraction in the valley, he said. And it works.
Advertised as 95 percent effective, the fence has lived up to its billing, Stenger said.
”The fence gets more and more effective as the does teach their fawns to stay away from it and then the fawns teach their own offspring,” he said.
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ROCK CUT STATE PARK-Wildlife biologist Tom Beisel really is in no mood to share his deer stories. He is in the middle of a controversy at this 2,743-acre park near Rockford.
The deer population in the park has grown so large that the whitetail have begun stripping the bark from trees, a sign of a dwindling food supply.
The state has proposed allowing bow hunters and sharpshooters to kill 485 deer during the next three years, but animal-rights and anti-cruelty groups have protested that plan.
Things have gotten personal, Beisel said, and his deer stories are all dark ones.
”I`d have to say it has affected my personal life; I`ve gotten a few things in the mail,” said Tom Beisel, a state wildlife biologist.
”The worst thing though, was a letter that our former division chief got in the mail. He is a diabetic and he recently underwent an amputation because of it,” Beisel said.
”The letter was from a Chicago woman who is a member in an animal rights group. She wrote that she found it `ironic` that our chief had to have a leg amputation.
”And then she said, `What goes around, comes around.` ”
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SPRINGFIELD-John Burke is the official spokesman for the Illinois Department of Transportation. He is also a sports car buff. Sometimes his job and his hobby don`t mix.
One summer day, he was driving back to Springfield from a vacation in Michigan. He was behind the wheel of his beloved 1981 Porsche 911, which he had spent years saving for, he wants taxpayers to know.
”I was extra cautious driving in Michigan because all of the deer up there, but I made it all the way down to Springfield on U.S. 72 where there wasn`t a tree in sight.”
Suddenly, out of a roadside ditch there came a deer toward his car.
He managed to slow his car so that his path and that of the deer did not appear to be in line for a collision, but being a state highway man, Burke made a few maneuvers to convince the deer that trying to cross four lanes of interstate might not be a good idea.
Herding deer in a Porsche proved not to be a good idea.
Somehow the deer came to be standing atop the hood of the Porsche, Burke said. The deer did a dance on the hood of the bright red sports car, causing $1,400 in damage.
And then, Burke said, it added insult to injury: It urinated on his windshield.
Unhurt and relieved, the deer then trotted off.
Burke is still trying to overcome the trauma.
”I don`t get any respect,” he said, ”even when I`m on vacation.”
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CARBONDALE-Alan Woolf is the director of the Southern Illinois University Cooperative Wildlife Research Laboratory.
A Ph.D. biologist, he is on the technical advisory committee for Ryerson Woods in Lake County.
He is also conducting a study of the deer problems in Carbondale, where deer often come for dinner uninvited.
He lived in deer-dense western Pennsylvania for 14 years, studying deer habits.
And still, he hit a deer with his car recently.
”A friend called up on a Sunday and asked us to come over for pizza,”
he said. ”We took off in my wife`s new Camry station wagon. And I harvested a doe a mile and a half from my house, doing $2,000 in damage to the car.
”My wife wanted to know how a wildlife biologist could be dumb enough to hit a deer,” said Woolf, who has the question under advisement.
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ALTO PASS-The fruit tree orchards of southern Illinois contain sweet-smelling apple, peach, cherry and nectarine trees. But often, they smell like a shower stall.
Hanging from the limbs of the trees, along with budding fruit, are plastic bags containing bars of Dial, Safeguard, Irish Spring, or whatever deodorant soap happened to be on sale when the orchard grower last went shopping for deer repellents.
Soap-in-a-baggie is one of the most effective cheap methods that orchard- growers have found to deter the deer from eating the buds off their fruit trees.
Wayne Sirles, owner and operator of Rendleman Orchards, has tried every sort of deer repellent known, but always seems to come up a few hairs short, Sirles said.
”We try the little bars of hotel soap, which we alternate with mothballs. We spray household cleaners that contain ammonia, and we have used human hair,” Sirles said.
Human hair, he explained, gives off a scent that deer find unattractive. Most human hair, that is.
”Now, don`t make me out to be a sexist or anything, but women use a lot of conditioners on their hair and they take the natural oil out that gives off the scent,” Sirles said. ”So we usually have to go to men`s barbershops and just collect the hair there.
”But the problem is that a lot of the barbers don`t want to fool with saving the male hair for us, they want to just sweep it up and throw it in the trash,” he said.
Some growers alternate their scented unappetizers month to month, and sometimes they resort to even stronger smelling tactics.
Hog tankage, a particularly malodorous swine feed, is one such anti-deer weapon, though it is not as exotic as another tried occasionally by orchard growers.
Several years ago, a group of them in southern Illinois went to the St. Louis Zoo, entered the lion`s den, and the tiger`s, and returned with a few truckloads of anti-deer dung from the wild kingdom.
”We tried it, but it was tough to handle and it just wasn`t feasible,”
Sirles said. ”The zookeepers don`t much like collecting it for us either, and you can`t blame them.”
Deers are a problem outside the orchards of southern Illinois too, Sirles said.
”We have a tremendous amount of vehicle damage from deer around here,”
he said. ”I had a friend killed. . . .”
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COBDEN-On Dec. 8, 1989, Roger Holly, 56, a gregarious Cobden insurance adjuster and father of four, was driving home on Illinois 51 with his wife, Fran, a registered nurse.
As they approached the turnoff for Cobden on the two-lane highway, another car came toward them in the opposite lane. Just as the two cars were about to pass, a deer ran onto the road.
The other car struck the deer, propelling it through the windshield of the Hollys` van. The deer`s body sailed into the driver`s side of the van, striking Roger Holly and breaking his neck.
The deer was moving with such velocity that it went on through the van and out the back window.
Fran Holly managed to seize the steering wheel, even though the steering column itself was bent by the impact of the deer, and get the vehicle stopped. As a nurse, she knew immediately that her husband was dead. Neither she nor the driver of the other car was seriously injured.
Sirles, in nearby in Alto Pass, said Roger Holly was active in his church and a popular member of the community.
”He was my friend too,” said Union County Coroner Darryl Rendleman.
”He was a fine guy.”
