This doe was hit this summer on busy State Highway 42/57 just south of the bridge over the ship canal in Door County. Sturgeon Bay, like many urban areas, has an overabundance of deer, causing vehicle crashes and property damage. Photo by www.dansmalloutdoors.com

The massive rack of a 10-point whitetail buck hangs above the desk of Ricky Lien, urban wildlife ecologist for Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources. Lien wishes that he or another hunter might have had a chance to shoot that buck during the hunting season, but it was hit by a car in a Milwaukee County park.

Today, it's hard to find a place in Wisconsin that doesn't have deer. In the past two decades, deer have moved into communities statewide, and it looks as if they are there to stay. While some folks welcome deer in the suburbs, others do not. Deer management in urban areas -- where hunting might not be an option and citizens' viewpoints are diverse -- has become one of the more controversial wildlife management problems of our time.

The only full-time person in the state charged with this fight, Lien is a crusader whose mission is to help Wisconsin understand its new urban deer dilemma and what can be done about it.

GROWING PAINS
A 1929 Wisconsin Conservation Department survey estimated our state's deer population at less than 30,000. Conservation wardens thought 21 counties had no deer at all! Fast forward to the 21st century, when DNR estimates put the whitetail population at, give or take, 1.5 million going into each fall hunting season.

Hunters love the abundance of deer, but many still complain that there aren't enough of them where they hunt. Meanwhile, deer have become a nuisance in back yards and city parks, and on our highways. There are simply so many deer in Wisconsin that they have spilled out of their natural habitat into places less wild, but where they find everything they need.

"Deer are adaptable," said DNR big-game ecologist Keith Warnke. "In the absence of predation, they can live with people and they can do so in high densities."

Deer are moving in on people, but people are also encroaching on deer. Many older Wisconsin communities have abundant green space in the form of parks, river corridors and large back yards, which provide both food and habitat for deer. And as communities grow, they expand into former farmland or forestland, which is already good deer habitat.

At a recent national conference, Lien asked his Texas counterpart how the Lone Star State deals with urban deer issues. He was surprised to learn that, despite that state's huge deer herd, Dallas doesn't have a deer problem because Dallas/Fort Worth is "concrete from one end to the other."

Deer look at bluegrass lawns, ornamental shrubs, gardens and spilled seed at bird feeders as a source of food. Add to that the fact that feeding deer within view of backyard decks has become a major form of entertainment that has spawned an entire support industry, and it's no wonder that deer have moved into town to stay.

Deer are prolific, which compounds the problem. A deer herd can expand by a factor of 1.5 annually. In the absence of predators such as bears and wolves, there is no natural way to control deer numbers. The DNR allows hunting statewide, but many local ordinances prohibit the discharge of firearms and bows for safety reasons, thus shutting hunters out of areas where deer numbers are growing.

"Many of our urban areas are heaven for deer," said Lien. "If you remove our No. 1 management tool -- hunting -- you've got an even better heaven. Combine basic deer biology with the kind of landscape they like and then remove hunting, and the table is set for an explosion in deer numbers."

Some communities in southeast Wisconsin have well over 100 deer per square mile. This number is four or five times too large for natural deer range. In a municipal area, it can be catastrophic.

In the Sheboygan County village of Kohler, for instance, deer were seen walking down residential streets at night, giving birth in backyards and munching flower gardens in broad daylight. Deer-car collisions in this village of 2,000 averaged 65 a year from 2000 through 2002. Many residents gave up trying to plant gardens, and they wrapped snow fence and burlap around their besieged ornamental shrubs in winter to keep deer from browsing them down to stumps.