A friend at TP&W once told me that there are two kinds of deer people (there are many more kinds of dear people, but that’s different story). Anyway, he said that half the people love deer and want to see them every day in their back yard, but the other half hate them and want to get rid of them all. I admit I’ve spent time in both camps. The deer I love were those up in the Utah mountains where we had a cabin. This deer population was kept in check by nature’s balance of predators and disease, were not tame, stayed far away from people, and came into your yard to eat your rose bushes at their peril. The deer I hate are the ones around here, who lounge on front lawns as if they are the family dog, who stare unafraid at you while chewing the leaves off your prize whatever plant, and who multiply like rabbits, their last natural predator having been dispatched years ago.
And this time of year, I dislike them most of all. From September through November male deer look for trees to clean their antlers of summer velvet. The bucks also thrash and batter trees for noise effect, coating the twigs and bark with scent glands to mark territory. It’s called the fall mating “rut.” If you’ve ever walked out to pick up your morning paper and noticed one of your immature trees with bark scraped off, branches torn and hanging limply, you know the words coming to mind. The damage can be significant, and fully girdled trees will die.
Take steps now to protect young trees by wrapping trunks with plastic trunk wraps, strips of rubber tubing or protect with hardware mesh stretched around steel posts in a circle. Pre-formulated spray-on repellents are a common deer control technique, but a deer in rut may well disregard the disagreeable taste and odor altogether.
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