Things change: How hunters and deer adapt

Deer were few and far between when I was growing up in Sudbury in the 1960s. Dad told stories of terrific hunts with his buddies in the 1950s, but a series of bad winters late in that decade came close to wiping them out in the sur­rounding forests. In Ontario, deer were still rela­tively common in a band of forest land from Parry Sound eastward, the extreme northwest, and a few other places, such as Manitoulin Island. Overall, though, numbers were down and for many years just the sight of a deer was a thrill. Indeed, the opening sentence of a 1970 Ministry of Natural Resources pamphlet “The white-tailed deer in Ontario” was “Look! A deer!” Whitetails are native only to north, central, and the extreme north corner of South America. They were uncommon in what is now Ontario when the first Europeans arrived, found “mainly along the north shore of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River, and on the north shore of Lake Erie.” Despite early settlers laying a licking on white­tails, eliminating them across much of their former range, deer survived. Today, there are once again millions of deer across a large swath of Canada and the US. Deer adapted The whitetail is considered by many to be the pre­mier big game animal in North America. Its ability to adapt and thrive despite enormous changes in habitat, human hunting, and other pressures is virtually unmatched by other animals. Ted Gorsline, a one-time OOD contributing writer who became a professional hunter in Africa for many years, told me that in his opinion, none of the African plains game offered as difficult a quarry as the whitetail. But Gorsline was only familiar with the deer he had known — the modern day deer is much differ­ent. Europeans, armed with firearms, were able to slaughter deer because the animals were naive when it came to guns. Arrows and spears had a much more limited range, and humans, at a dis­tance, were not a threat, until they were. At the deer camps I have frequented, a favou­rite saying for many years was that “Deer are either scared or dead.” Getting close to a deer while hunt­ing was hard. Then, sometime in the 1970s deer behaviour across much of North America began to take another turn. Instead of avoiding human contact, some deer, recognizing not all humans were out to kill them,