After two hard years of effort to clear black locust, buckthorn, and other invasive vegetation at Cook County's Bob Mann Woods Forest Preserve, the payoff this summer should have been a profusion of Michigan lilies and other wildflowers. Yet, lamented volunteer steward Ed Hammer, "We never see them bloom. The deer eat them."

This wasn't the first time Hammer's excitement had been dimmed. In the spring, a secluded glade usually sparkling with hundreds of early-blooming wildflowers was picked clean by foraging deer.

This same scene is playing out in forest preserves and backyards throughout Chicago Wilderness as an uncontrolled suburban deer population continues to explode, threatening both restoration efforts and the health of the deer herds themselves.

Without natural predators, the deer population overwhelms available habitat. And ecologists say that restoration activities without deer control can be wasted efforts.

"Things like buckthorn removal and...burning regimens need to be coupled with aggressive deer management to be effective," said Tim Van Deelen, deer research specialist at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and former ecologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey. "If you don't do enough removal, the deer removal that you do might be irrelevant."

A "browse line" shows how high the mouths of deer can reach. Beneath it, little forest vegetation remains. Photo by Jim Nachel.

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Deer are one of the greatest threats to natural sites, hampering conservation efforts as effectively as invasive species, development, and vandalism. At the same time, however, deer have become icons as one of the last vestiges of unsettled America and, as such, have sparked contentious public policy debates over just how the herds should be managed.

"Your biggest barrier is in educating people that, for the sake of biodiversity and the health and well-being of the deer themselves, an aggressive removal program is needed," said Van Deelen, who also serves as an adjunct assistant professor for the University of Illinois and for the University of Wisconsin.

In the absence of wild predators and with the abolition of hunting in suburban areas, deer thrive in an artificial landscape full of nutritious foods. They live longer lives and reproduce quickly. This has led to dangerously high densities of foraging deer. The cud-chewing deer graze intermittently, one plant here and another there, returning the next day for more. Lacking top front teeth, the deer cannot bite cleanly, but instead rip at leaves and stems, leaving jagged edges. Eventually, the plants die, as pieces are lopped off bit by bit, year after year. Lilies, orchids, Solomon's seal, false Solomon's seal, trillium, enchanter's nightshade, and tender young oak seedlings are among the most popular items on the deer menu.

The deer are "like gourmets at a cafeteria," said Joan Palincsar, volunteer steward at Ryerson Conservation Area in Lake County. "They go through and sample things, and if it tastes good they eat more of it and remember it the next day and come back and finish it."

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In 1992, when the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County started deer control at Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve, most vegetation outside this deer enclosure had been browsed away (top left). Over time, the plant species that survived the overbrowsing are coming back. Photos courtesy of Forest Preserve District of DuPage County.

Deer are primarily a species of open woods and savannas, an "edge" species that prefers disturbed areas on the fringes of forests. Suburbia and farming have created more "edge" environments, with a banquet of highly nutritious food options that encourage robust deer to deliver multiple births — not just twins, but also triplets and even quadruplets.

"You're talking suburban Chicago, a relatively mild climate from the point of view of deer, a virtually unlimited food supply year round, and these deer are putting out fawns at almost the physiological maximum for the species," Van Deelen said.

Management of deer is relatively recent, starting locally in the late 1980s with the creation of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources' Urban Deer Project to study urban deer and prescribe solutions. The agency created the project not just because of damage to sensitive natural areas but also because of rising numbers of deer-vehicle accidents (which reached an all-time high of 2,063 in 1992 in Cook, DuPage, and Lake counties) and alarming incidents of deer wandering onto runways at O'Hare International Airport.

Deer Project studies included research on deer diets, deer mortality rates, and a population census. Most of the studies were done in Cook County at Busse Woods, part of which is a dedicated nature preserve, where the deer population amounted to an astonishing 100 deer per square mile. There, deer had stripped the woods of vegetation. Skeletal-looking deer had resorted to eating unpalatable buckthorn — something akin to desperate humans eating cardboard — and were peeling bark off mature elm trees until it hung in strips like ribbon.

Investigators found that rural deer forage across a larger range than urban deer, which often don't leave their limited home range, even when they are starving. They also found that in the stressed urban herd, many fawns died, and deer that did survive were stunted. When deer densities were lowered, however, some of the plants began to grow again and deer became healthier.

Some conservationists suggest that recreational hunting is one of the most cost-effective and natural ways to control deer, reflective of man's historic role as predator and part of the ecosystem. If designed and carried out with respect for the animal and the ecosystem, it could become a part of the emerging metropolitan culture of nature conservation.

According to Van Deelen, however, "In Chicago Wilderness, where the emphasis is on native biodiversity and not on recreational hunting, you almost can't marshal enough effort to be effective at culling deer."

Since 1993, a total of 5,786 deer, most of them females, have been removed via culling from forest preserves in Cook, DuPage, and Lake Counties — districts that, in the absence of regular hunting, rely most heavily on culling programs. Of these, 1,617 were culled from Cook, 3,782 from DuPage, and 387 from Lake. The meat is donated to food pantries. Costs of deer management, including hiring of contractors to do the culling, range anywhere from about $100 to nearly $500 per deer removed. Costs depend on how many deer are culled (the more deer that are culled, the lower the costs per deer), the size of the preserves, and the ease of finding deer.

Over the last decade, deer-control protestors initially slowed the deer culling programs in Cook, DuPage, and Lake Counties. Protesters also recently, albeit unsuccessfully, challenged efforts by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources to allow hunting in state parks, including Indiana Dunes State Park, located outside of Chicago.

The ambivalence about deer culling is understandable. As Illinois' largest free-ranging mammal, deer provide an emotional tug and feed into some people's notions of what is "natural." On another level, people perceive them as pets. Like birds at the bird feeder, people like to see them and want to help them.

Rural people have quite a different perception. Many talk about a "oneness with nature" that recreational hunters experience. And many hunters have a sophisticated appreciation of the role of human predation in the ecosystem. In rural areas, the average person sees hunting as natural, but a consensus on the role of deer in a suburban metropolitan culture has yet to emerge.

The McHenry County Conservation District started a hunting program on one site in the winter of 2001. Last winter, the district opened two sites for hunting. District records show that 46 archers shot 17 deer, and 29 firearms hunters shot 20 deer. Minus expenses, the district netted almost $7,800 from hunting permits.

In Indiana, hunting is allowed at Indiana Dunes State Park, where officials say the annual cost to control the deer population is a few hundred dollars a year. The state does not put a quota on how many deer should be killed, but it adjusts the number of hunters allowed, as well as the number and type of deer they can take. This fall, two separate groups of 95 hunters each will be allowed at Indiana Dunes State Park. Hunting is not allowed at nearby Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, where biologists are working to determine the effects of deer on the habitat there and assess best-practice management solutions.

Ironically, overhunting in past decades almost led to the deer's extinction. Native Americans used deer for food, clothing, and tools. White settlers also wanted venison and hides for leather. By the end of the 1800s, deer were nearly extinct in much of the nation, including Illinois. By the 1900s, legislation had begun to put limits on hunting, and deer were reintroduced to many parts of the country. People began moving to the cities, where they developed a romantic ideal of nature as a sanctuary. Then came Bambi. Walt Disney's fantasy of the cruel hunter blasting away the noble, peaceful deer helped create a culture of antagonism to hunting. Deer numbers rebounded, and by the mid-to-late 20th century, deer overpopulation had become a problem in many areas.

From time to time, nature lives up to society's romantic ideal, as suggested in this real-life Bambi-meets-Flower scene. The daily reality, however, is a vastly more complex, difficult, and beautiful thing. Photo by Alan G. Nelson/Root Resources.

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Historians have estimated that between 23 and 35 million deer roamed the nation circa 1500 to 1800. No one knows how many deer are in the region or nation today, and biologists suggest that it doesn't matter. What does matter is damage at individual sites.

 "A broad-scale deer census is not all that important to have," said Marty Jones, manager for the Urban Deer Project. "If we had, say, 10,000 deer in Cook County, how much difference would it be if we had 15,000 or 5,000? We have to focus on the localized overabundance where they are perceived as a problem."

"Deer are beautiful, fascinating creatures and I just can't help but like them," volunteer Palincsar said. "But I can also see the damage that they do. The deer determine how tall many of the plants grow, determine whether they bloom or not, and, in some cases, they determine whether they exist or not. Much as we like the deer," she said, "in certain places, there are just too many of them."