Montana News
How's life as an urban deer?
(upbeat music) Welcome to The Big Y, a series from Montana Public Radio where we find out what we can discover together. I'm your host, Austin Amistoy. This is a show about listener-powered reporting. We'll answer questions large or small about anything under the big sky. By Montana's for Montana, this is The Big Y. I've got reporter, Edward O'Brien joining us today. It's good to have you back, Ed. Hey, Austin, it's always great sharing some studio time with you. Ed, your Big Y question today asks us about polarizing critters roaming our neighborhoods. They're loved and appreciated by some despised and considered a nuisance pest by others. Oh, dear, yes. And we are talking about our urban deer population. Listener Ann Carp wonders, what's life like for an urban deer? There is certainly no shortage of front porch deer watching opportunities around Missoula Ed, but what prompted Ann to ask? Ann tells us that when she sees City Deer, and it happens a lot, all these wonderful questions run through her mind. How's life? Are you liking life? Okay, you know, are you aware that you're living a really unusual life for a deer? I just got really curious because you can't ask a deer how it's feeling. So I thought I'd ask you guys and see if you had some insights. Fascinating questions, indeed. Who did you turn to to get some answers, Ed? Ryan Klimstra was a great source of information. So I'm a wildlife biologist for fish wildlife and parks. Klimstra and his FWP colleagues handle all kinds of wildlife issues. One day, they're surveying wild game animals to fine tune hunting quotas. The next, they might be consulting a homeowner on how to discourage a pesky northern flicker from pecking on their sighting. And you too took something of a field trip, right? Well, try to. I don't know about your neighborhood this summer, Austin, but mine was crawling with deer. There were plenty of handsome young bucks strutting around and those carefully tending to their fawns. So I invited Klimstra over for an urban safari of sorts. Urban safari? Stroll the hood, hopefully see some white tails. Get in some good talk. Now, of course, that particular day, we didn't see one single deer. Still, it was a fascinating conversation. For example, I didn't know deer were over hunted nearly to extinction in the late 1800s. And it wasn't until right around the turn of the century in 1900 with the Lacey Act that prohibited market hunting that kind of turned things around and started the momentum to rebound deer populations. Wow, it is really tough to imagine deer were once almost exterminated in the U.S. Isn't that wild? From near extinction to an estimated population in the U.S. of over 30 million. Ed, Ann wanted to know about what life is like for our urban deer. So maybe let's start with what draws them out of the wild and into our neighborhoods in the first place. Yeah, well, think about it from a deer's perspective. What's not to love about our comfy, cozy, suburban lifestyle? In this case, meaning a never ending. All you can eat veggie buffet and relatively few predators. What's more, Klimster tells us deer are incredibly adaptable. So get this. Around this time of year, microbes in their intestines start to assume new responsibilities. What does that mean? Well, in the summer, they're capable of processing and digesting lush grass, shrubs, leaves, perhaps a few goodies they manage to poach from our gardens, but in the fall and winter? Their gut biome then allows them to nibble little twigs or even dry grass. Things that just don't have a lot of crude protein in them, but their gut biome helps them extract those things and digest them. What a gilded life deer in the suburbs have at any downsides. How our unrestrained dogs are a risk to them, especially their fawns, obviously cars present a significant danger to them. In fact, according to State Farm Insurance data, Montanans hit wildlife on roads, mostly deer at the second highest rate in the nation. Heck, I frequently see deer hobbling around on broken legs. It might not look good to us, but, you know, three-legged deer, not that uncommon or a deer with a broken leg. Typically, in a more wild setting, a predator would have a little bit easier time thinning those deer out. Here, we just have a front row seat to seeing it. Klimster adds that he and his colleagues, including local police officers, wind up euthanizing, killing many deer who have been gravely injured by cars or got tangled up and terribly hurt in fencing. Sometimes the best alternative is to put them out of their agony as quickly as possible. Ed and carp, our question-asker, lives in Missoula. How big is the deer population there? Well, we don't know. There's never been a census of city deer in Missoula. In years past, city council members just didn't think such a study would be worth the expense. Recently, however, there have been rumblings about revisiting the idea, but nothing definite yet. Well, what's moving the needle on those conversations? Chronic wasting disease. Right, CWD. That's the deadly illness that affects animals like deer and elk and moose, right? Correct. The symptoms are just awful. They include dramatic weight loss, chronic listlessness, and excessive thirst in urination. It's a certain death sentence. Libby's deer population in northwest Montana is a cautionary tale for many communities ever since CWD was detected in a doe there in 2019. We found that about 13% of them in town had CWD. That's Neil Anderson, the wildlife manager for Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks in northwest Montana. Anderson says Libby residents have long had a love-hate relationship with local deer, and as in Missoula, there were differences of opinion on how to best handle them. I'm betting CWD changed that. Yeah, it introduced a sobering reality check into the discussion with the discovery of that infected doe five years ago. FWP shifted gears from occasionally euthanizing injured or older local deer to more assertively reducing the local deer population. Overcrowded deer in an urban environment is a recipe for spreading CWD. During the winter, we hired some technicians. We have traps. We bait those traps. We trap deer. We euthanize them. So, is the work paying off? Well, Anderson says the prevalence of infected deer in Libby initially trended in the right direction. CWD rates decreased, but they appear to be creeping back up just a little bit. Officials aren't too alarmed, though, and are going to keep plugging away to reduce cases in and around Libby. It really seems like the goal from officials isn't to eradicate CWD, I imagine that's extremely unlikely, but it seems instead to be limiting its spread. You got it, Austin. There's a lot at stake, and you can bet many other Montana communities are closely watching Libby's response. Well, at the lives of those deer roaming our neighborhoods and serenely chowing down on our lawns are a little more complicated than I realized. How did this information go over with Ann Carp? Our question asked her this week. Ann still wonders what these animals are feeling and thinking, so removed from their usual, more wild habitat. It's a tough nut to crack for me, but I did love her response. I guess I'll just have to keep being curious and maybe make up my own stories for how they're feeling at any given point. Well, Ed, thanks for all your reporting, let me know if you ever want to go on another urban safari I might take along. You bet, we'll do that. Now we want to know what makes you curious about Montana. This show is all about answering your question, so send them to us at mtpr.org/bigy. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts, and help others find the show by sharing it and leaving us a review. Let's see what we can discover together. [BLANK_AUDIO]