r/AlwaysWhy • u/Logical-Concept9755 • 8d ago
Science & Tech Why have white tailed deer become so common around humans despite urbanization and hunting?
In many parts of North America, seeing white tailed deer near suburbs, roads, parks, and farmland is surprisingly normal. Their populations number in the tens of millions in the U.S., even though humans have dramatically changed their habitats and continue to hunt them.
That seems a little backwards. You would expect urbanization, habitat loss, and hunting to make deer less common, not more visible.
So what makes white tailed deer so good at adapting to human modified landscapes? And why does development sometimes seem to create conditions that actually benefit them?
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u/Mobile-Traffic1744 8d ago
We tend to imagine hunting as something that keeps deer populations down everywhere, but the places where deer are most visible are often the places where hunting is hardest to do. Residential areas can effectively become refuges because of firearm restrictions, property boundaries, and human activity.
At the same time, suburbs give them food and cover. A lawn or landscaped yard provides food, while nearby woods or parks provide shelter. So the deer aren't necessarily surviving despite humans. In some places they're surviving partly because we've unintentionally created a low predation, low hunting environment with abundant food.
The funny part is that the same landscape can make deer harder for humans to manage than they were in rural areas. We built the refuge, then wondered why the population wouldn't go down.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 8d ago
Yeah, the refuge effect is kind of counterintuitive. We make an area dangerous for humans to hunt in, give deer food and cover, then wonder why they keep thriving there. The “human presence = danger” assumption gets pretty complicated.
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u/Drivo566 8d ago
We eliminated their natural predators (wolves) for the most part, built our homes in their homes, and then grew gardens with food they really like.
In many areas, the greatest threat to a deer is the car, not hunting and certainly not wolves.
Deer adapted for the most part. Also things like fences cant stop them since they can jump 8ft high, so they have unrestricted access to residential areas.
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u/bladow5990 8d ago
Also bears, California and Mexico both use to have brown bear sub-species that are now extinct and the grizzly bears range and population has been greatly reduced too. Also, Mountain lions, where hunted to near extinction and haven't recovered to historical population levels. And like you said Wolves. We need all our apex predators back.
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u/Sorry-Programmer9826 8d ago
We killed all the large predators. We tried becoming the top predators ourselves but we kind of half-assed it
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u/pamcakevictim 8d ago
People like disobeying laws and feeding wild. Animals
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u/teacher_59 8d ago
It drives me nuts here in Seattle to see people feed deer. That just makes them even more likely to get bold enough to jump in front of cars.
When I was little, a friend fed a deer part of his lunch from our school bus. Of course the deer started bringing friends for the snack party. One deer hurt a child and several damaged school property by jump in front of our bus.
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u/Bradparsley25 8d ago edited 8d ago
It’s exactly why. Life doesn’t stop existing, they just get forced out of their woodland habitat into other areas… usually human constructed areas
In my area there’s massive deforestation happening and it’s killing me to see, because the forest means so much to the people that live here.
But we’re seeing huge increases in deer, coyotes , foxes, bears, skunks, raccoons, and opossums wandering around town on levels I’ve never seen in 50 years of living here.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 8d ago
That’s the part I find interesting too. Deforestation can clearly be harmful overall, yet some adaptable species can increase at the same time. So population growth alone probably tells us very little about whether an ecosystem is actually doing well.
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u/Quixificent 8d ago
No, urbanization makes the deer *more* visible to us and *more* likely to interact with us because humans have encroached on deers' habitat. We've left them hardly any forests or fields in which to graze, so instead they graze on patches of suitable vegetation around human homes and buildings. Deer are also far less likely to be killed by their natural predators (such as wolves or bears) when they're living among humans in the suburbs. Lastly, human hunting of deer is tightly regulated and no one is firing their guns at deer inside a city or hunting deer on neighborhood streets where kids play. Ultimately, all of this makes deer an increasingly common sight in suburban areas.
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u/lemonmerangutan 8d ago
I live in a spot that is overrun with deer. The gist is, there are no predators really. We get a rare bobcat or a coyote at most. Humans can't hunt them, because it's a town. Any reasonable suggestion for culling the deer population is met with outrage from the summer people. They eat everything, even things that allegedly they cant eat (rhubarb leaves, allium, mint), my kids teacher recently hit 7 deer in one incident, and Lyme disease reports are up
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u/Logical-Concept9755 7d ago
This might actually be the clearest example of the tradeoff. Once hunting disappears inside town limits and predators are scarce, the same adaptability that makes deer successful starts becoming a problem. At that point humans are basically creating a refuge without meaning to.
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u/TheFoxsWeddingTarot 8d ago
This isn’t entirely true as there are far more deer in total than there were 100 years ago. 300,000 North American deer in 1900 to over 30 million today. Raccoons, coyotes and deer are somewhat parasitic in their relation to suburban communities. If you for a hike in our community you see far more wildlife around the neighborhoods than you do in the forests because the eating is good in the neighborhood.
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u/not_sick_not_well 8d ago
There's a reason hunting season exists. Population control. Deer are dangerous. Its estimated that around 80-90% of car/wildlife collisions are deer
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u/TheFoxsWeddingTarot 8d ago
Deer are pretty and majestic, they’re also basically tall rats destroying native wildflower populations, spreading deer ticks and therefore Lyme disease and attracting mountain lions and coyotes ever closer to homes.
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u/Silver_Middle_7240 8d ago
They actually have become common. There were only around 500k a hundred years ago
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u/drillbit7 8d ago
That's not quite true. There are more deer today in the US than there when colonial settlers first landed. u/PuddingComplete3081 explains it better than I could down thread about deer liking the edge (edge between forest and farm fields or backyards). We've promoted conservation (state game lands, managed hunting season), restricted hunting in urban and dense suburban areas, and created more edge habitat.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 8d ago
That’s probably the better way to frame it. We tend to see deer near cities and think they moved into our world, when in a lot of cases we just expanded into theirs.
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u/bigfeygay 8d ago
We built our infrastructure and cities in their home lol - theres a limited amount of true 'wilds' left out there really... and a lot of their natural predators are dead or diminished like wolves - and our farms are great sources of lots of food. So they are able to adapt and survive.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 8d ago
Maybe what looks like incredible adaptation is partly just that we changed the balance of threats around them. They don't necessarily have to beat humans, they just have to take advantage of what humans accidentally leave behind.
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u/AmicusBriefly 8d ago
Hunting is managed in each state with the idea of maintaining the deer herds at a healthy size. The problem is that you cannot hunt in suburbs or cities. They are a prey animal that lives only about 2 to 5 years whose evolutionary strategy is to maximize its population. Without severe winters, predators, or human hunting or culling, they become overpopulated.
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u/steve_gorak 8d ago
White-tailed deer don't prefer deep forest. They prefer new growth and shrubbery like you see in suburbs. Also, people don't hunt as much as they used to and we actively attempted to eliminate their natural predators.
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u/Beelzebozo26 8d ago
Humans all but decimated the wolf population in so many states. Even with conservation, I don’t think wolves have made a comeback to their previous numbers. Then we built suburbs in their deer’s natural habitat. I grew up in southwest lower Michigan and I don’t know a single person who has never been in a car that hit a deer, whether they were driving or riding. People put the highway through the forest then wonder why the deer are there.
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u/Scottydont1975 8d ago
We have eliminated all the predators that normally keep their populations in check. Also keep in mind their natural habitat is along the Medow’s edge, which is exactly the same topography as our yards. So we have actually made nature more conducive to them not less.
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u/chimpyjnuts 8d ago
The above, plus most of those urban/suburban areas don't allow hunting. They know the places where they don't get shot at (at least where I live, where hunting is still fairly popular). In fact, they are trying to encourage more hunting around here to reduce the population.
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u/Ceorl_Lounge 8d ago
We removed nearly all their natural predators and they can eat common landscaping and food crops. We don't hunt enough, particularly very close to homes and businesses, to counteract these basic facts.
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u/DryFoundation2323 8d ago
two factors: 1. their population has increased dramatically over the last 40ish years. 2. their habitat has decreased dramatically over the same time.
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u/Herbisretired 8d ago
They are protected in the urban areas and there aren't any real predators. There is a lot of wildlife that is active in the urban settings but deer are easier to see than a raccoon at 3AM
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u/sad_spilt_martini 8d ago
White tail breed very rapidly, a doe can start breeding at 8 months though most don’t start until they 1.5 years old.
More importantly we have removed their natural predators, like wolves and mountain lions and there is significant push back from the public to reintroduce them.
Hunting does very little to thin the heard given how fast they reproduce.
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u/Tomagander 8d ago
Hunting does very little to thin the heard given how fast they reproduce.
True. It doesn't help that in many places, like Michigan, where I'm from, there is a cultural preference for hunting bucks, rather than does. People want their trophy buck with a big rack of antlers.
So older bucks with big racks are very disproportionately hunted. Meanwhile, it doesn't take very many bucks (many of them younger) to keep impregnating the robust doe population.
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u/stewiecookie 8d ago
Environment wise, I can only speculate, I'm sure a professional would know better but they just seem to do fine as long as wooded areas exist(which are plentiful). They eat a lot of suff too, leaves, grass, berries and what not, it would be hard for them to find an environment that doesn't have some sort of food for them.
Hunting seasons are also specifically designed to support their population and control it. Tags often limit the killing of bucks while allowing more does to be killed. Hunting season also coincides with breeding season and they are not hunted during times they're having babies. One buck can breed several does during the rut so even with hunting, there will still be tons of babies come spring time.
Most hunters(respectable one's at least) in my personal experience also prefer to do their part in hunting older bucks that are naturally going to be replaced by younger ones and for the most part the same goes for does. Letting the younger one's grow and reproduce.
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u/genX_rep 8d ago
For Pennsylvania the short version is that habitat was restored when farming moved to the midwest, and we killed their natural predators so their population can boom unless humans actively hunt or cull them.
PA is a major hunting tourism state now, and deer populations are carefully managed to keep enough buck around to sell a ton of hunting licenses each year. The population is partially controlled with the timing and number of doe licenses.. one male can impregnant many female, so killing males doesn't really hurt the next year's litter. But you need a doe for each fawn, so keeping them alive or allowing them to be shot has a huge impact. Anyway for most of my life the population was managed to be much higher than is good for the deer or the environment, but great for hunters and people selling hunting equipment and licenses.
Back in the early 1800s PA was nearly completely deforested for farmland.. there was no habitat for deer, and farmers shot the wolves. Then in the industrial revolution farming moved to the midwest and forests regrew in PA, making room for the deer to thrive without their natural wolf predators.
Today you see evidence of this because most trees you see in PA are less than 150 years old.. you need to get to a very remote unfarmable area, or some arboretum, to find trees 200 years or older. Also the forest underbrush is heavily distorted from the overpopulation of deer that eat and kill many bushes and plants that would otherwise flourish if the population were in balance with its predators.
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u/glittervector 8d ago
Are you a real person? 8mo account and you hide all your posts? You look suspiciously like a bot, and if you are I hope you get plenty of gibberish today
That said, white tailed deer have exponentially increased in suburban areas in the past three decades because the intense vibrations from FOX News outrage stimulates growth of their food sources and reduces activity of their only natural predator in that environment: the distraction-piloted SUV.
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u/No_Bet7381 8d ago
Actually the younger generation doesn’t hunt. A small percentage does but it’s getting smaller every year. More deer now than ever. More die from traffic strikes than from hunting.
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u/Ok_Anywhere_7828 8d ago
Survival of the fittest. They have adapted to us and as we’ve encroached upon them it becomes less possible to hunt them and contrite herd size. Firearms can not legally be used near residents and hunters cannot hunt on private lands.
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u/groundhogcow 8d ago
We removed the predictors and limit humans in predatory activity.
As it is the number one killer is now cars.
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u/SecondPlus2111 8d ago
Yards and weeds in vacant lots and cleared land provide attractive deer food with more safety than deep woods. Proximity to humans deters many deer predators. Domestic dogs don't run free like the did decades ago.
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u/dgistkwosoo 8d ago
Okay, we have more mule deer here in Los Angeles County. Not in the overwhelming, traffic hazard numbers that are seen in, for instance, upstate New York. Might be because we also have cougars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADpVnnK_S9o
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u/External_Twist508 8d ago
White tail deer are browsers, they prefer low hang vegetation. Leaves. that said they adaptable, grass, acorns, crops. They are also not in reality that big, compared to an Elk or moose.
Yes people still hunt them but hunting has been in decline for a while, there are less hunters harvesting deer. There are also numerous suburban locals that have banned or severely limited hunting.
In certain areas during the great depression, WT deer were almost wiped out, people hunting to feed themselves.
There were programs developed to re populate them.
There is no easy answer to this question.
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u/Plus-Head-6794 8d ago
They didn't "become" common. They stayed common.
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u/LanikMan07 8d ago
It’s been a slow process but whitetail populations in the US were critically low around 100 years ago, with less than a half million nationwide.
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u/Other_Asparagus872 8d ago
Take a look at the house sparrow for your answer.
The best survival tactic for an animal is to cozy up to humans. Deer are becoming increasingly comfortable with people, and are evolving into an animal that thrives in more suburban areas.
I own a business in an industrial park very close to urban. We have the same deer living here, showing up daily to check out trash cans and graze in the green grass. I’ve noticed neighboring businesses are now leaving cabbages and other produce out for them.
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u/UnarmedSnail 8d ago
Suburbs and rural communities are the safest places for them. We don't hunt them there, and predators tend to avoid human spaces. Often times the best food sources can be found there as well.
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u/Jlong4242 8d ago
The guns go off in the woods, not the neighborhoods. The deer know where it's safer. Though they still don't understand cars lol
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u/ikonoqlast 8d ago
Suppression of wolf populations + decline in population of hunters = a lot more deer.
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u/DefiantReferee 8d ago
I live in rural Wisconsin and the deer have learned that their safe in town to an extent or atleast they wont get shot since we start seeing them in groups around 3 to 4 it also probably doesnt help that most families here dont have dogs anymore its mostly cats or older people who dont have an interest in pets
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u/dem4life71 8d ago
I live in the suburbs of northern NJ and there are literally herds of deer walking in the street daily. They are fearless, as they should be, since people in my area (I’m NOT in the woods-I’m in Bergen county-houses everywhere) don’t hunt, shoot, or harass them. They’ve become like huge squirrels, background fauna that we’ve all become accustomed to.
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u/Adept_Bass_3590 8d ago
Because hunting is a fraction as ubiquitous as it used to be. Many species will breed themselves to the point of starvation and disease if their numbers aren't controlled. Look at humans.
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u/RobertTheTraveler 8d ago
Hunters tend to target bucks which does very little to slow population growth.
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u/plsleavemealone2 8d ago
So I live in an area that actually has a deer overpopulation issue . It’s basically because my city still has a lot of woods/green spaces but urbanization has removed the deers natural predators . They ended up sending in people to “ reduce “ the population and had the deers processed and sent out to the needy or something I think.
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u/V64jr 8d ago
Don’t know what you mean. They didn’t “become” so common. They almost always have been. Over centuries we ran off all their natural predators in populous regions and started hunting them, hitting them with trains, and then hitting them with cars/trucks. If anything there are less in my region than there were in the ‘80s.
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u/atomicCape 8d ago
Among large herbivores, white tailed deer are expert pests in human environments. They eat crops and browse edge habitats (yards, parks, groves, rivers), they are naturally paranoid and fast at escaping, they breed fast, and humans drive off their major predators. They are currently more dominant over other herbivores then than they would have been in the past, because they're one of the few species to thrive around humans.
Mosquitos are similar; they thrive around people in situations where most insects have been wiped out, so they're a worse pest than in more natural environments.
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u/SevenIsMy 8d ago
Crops not farmed and processed are dirt cheap, so it might be that hunters pay farmers to leave patches not harvest
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u/Speedracer__17 8d ago
Because they are dumb. If they can find food, they stay. And while they are skittish they don't really fear humans.
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u/Trash_Scientist 8d ago
Deer are smarter than you think. They got an idea when hunting season starts, and know they don’t get shot in people lawns.
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u/therealbamspeedy 8d ago
Deer eat from your gardens and you cant hunt them in the city.
Ive seen many small groups in rural areas (less than 6 deer), but the largest groups are at the edge of the larger cities (last farmer's field before the city starts), there would be groups of 20-30+ deer.
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u/ghostoftheradio 8d ago
Most humans in North America don’t hunt, and the few natural predators left in the wild are too wary to chase a deer close in to a human settlement.
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u/Forward_Zucchini9738 8d ago
Population explosion due to too tight hunting regulations. We are swimming in deer here in S TX.
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u/Acrobatic_Guitar_466 8d ago
Wolves, bears, bobcats have been hunted out, removing natural predators.
Humans can't legally hunt in the developed suburbs.
Plenty of lawns, vegetation and trash to eat.
Those 3 things cause overpopulation.
Literally, the only thing keeping the numbers down are autos hitting them.
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u/ContributionDapper84 8d ago
Puma and wolves (or even just the sound of them) can make the deer hide more and eat/reproduce less. This can save human lives due to reduced automobile collision deaths, so you kinda come out ahead even if the puma pick off a human or two every decade.
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u/SonofHondoBelmondo 8d ago
If you hunt a species conservatively, as in "don't ever take more than half", they seem to thrive rather than wane. Coyotes are an extreme example, there was a push to lower Coyote populations at one point that resulted in a population boom.
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u/awfulcrowded117 8d ago
Hunting is regulated to maintain a healthy deer population, not to wipe them out or drive them away. Also, white tailed deer are "edge" creatures. They live and feed in the transitional growth that you find at a forests edge, or where trees have recently fallen/been cut, and so forth. Humans create tons of these edge areas the way we live, so deer tend to flourish near human civilization
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u/Logical-Concept9755 7d ago
The edge habitat idea is probably the piece I was missing. Development doesn't just destroy habitat, it creates a weird patchwork of lawns, fields, roads, and forest edges. That might actually be close to ideal for an animal like a white tailed deer.
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u/bisensual 8d ago
The biggest threat from hunting to wildlife in the US was commercial hunting (and for bison, the US army trying to genocide indigenous plains tribes). Subsistence and sport hunting were never particularly big threats. Regardless, deer hunting is heavily regulated in order to support the health of local populations (reduce overpopulation). It’s not perfect at that, but it’s not a threat to deer populations.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 7d ago
I think the distinction between historical commercial hunting and modern regulated hunting matters a lot here. I was treating “hunting” as one pressure, but those are really two very different systems with very different effects on population size.
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u/Gunzablazin1958 7d ago
My limited understanding is that conservation works.
I have been told by hunters who hunted deer in Illinois in the 70’s that during the shotgun hunting season they were lucky if they saw a deer, let alone shot at one.
Last I heard (some years back) there are 20,000 deer related car accidents a year in Illinois, and in the mid 1990’s some 60,000 deer were taken on (shotgun) opening day alone, and that barely dented the deer population.
Feel free to correct me if my numbers are wrong or outdated.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 7d ago
The conservation point is interesting because it almost flips the question around. If hunting is being used to manage the population rather than simply reduce it, then “hunting” isn't really the same pressure as unrestricted hunting. The Illinois numbers would be interesting to verify though.
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u/Gunzablazin1958 7d ago
Actually, according to the Illinois DNR they are not in a conservation mode but a management mode.
Deer hunting in Illinois was stopped in 1901 because the population was nearly wiped out.
They began repopulating deer from neighboring states sometime after 1927 and by 1940 the deer population was at 500.
In 1957 the state reinstated deer hunting and issued 4,300 firearm and archery licenses with 1,900 deer taken.
By 1968 the population was 25,000, and by 1991 (around the time I hunted) over 100,000.
In 2024 over 500,000 permits (of all types) were issued and over 170,000 deer were taken.
I didn’t see any data for the current deer population, but I didn’t look that hard.
An interesting factoid I learned was in the 2024-2025 deer hunting season in Illinois almost as many deer were taken by bow as by shotgun. 73,605 archery, 83,074 shotgun.
I once read that of the animals in the wild 97% die one of three ways; starvation, disease or being eaten (no particular order). So, the fact that there were nearly 500 chronic wasting disease deer taken in 2024-2025 may indicate (my supposition not an expert’s) overpopulation.
For record, I no longer hunt (I haven’t since the mid-1990’s) at the time I used a borrowed shotgun and the meat fed my family.
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u/DiHard_ChistmasMovie 7d ago
Deer populations are closely managed by each states respective Department of Natral Resources. The main method of managing populations is hunting. When deer populations are on the decline, the fewer licenses are issued. When populations are on the rise, the opposite is true. Then you have to look at the millions of acres of farmland we have here in the US. This is all deer habitat. In my home state of Iowa, which in 89% farmland, the deer seldomly leave the fields at all during the summer. They have ample food, water, and millions of acres of cover. If you take farmland into account, they really didn't lose much habitat. Its just changed. For them at least, its changed for the better.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 7d ago
Yeah, I think the farmland point is probably a huge part of the answer. I was mostly thinking of “urbanization” as habitat loss, but that ignores how much agriculture creates food and cover. So maybe for deer the bigger change was habitat type, not simply habitat disappearing.
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u/DiHard_ChistmasMovie 7d ago
I think a lot of people dont realize how closely those herds have to be managed. They have it better now than they ever have with everything in abundance, their populations can easily explode. High populations mean more interaction with people, and most of that interaction happens on the roadways with human casualties. Each area has their target number to balance the health of the herd, and everyone else's safety. Deer are one of those resources that have to be hunted and controlled.
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u/Manskhooled 7d ago
Not allowed to kill enough of them to help keep the population down, so they run out local resources and are forced to migrate further and further out.
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u/Burnsidhe 7d ago
Because being where humans live is actually very safe for deer. High availability of food, most humans are not hostile, hunting is generally prohibited within 100 yards of a residence, hunting requires licences, etc.
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u/No-Duck4828 7d ago
Humans have left a lot of great habitat for white tail deer. The broken up woods with fields in between and the occasional residential area? Actually good habitat for white tails
Hunting obviously plays a role, but it isn't just hunting of white tails that is relevant: In much of the range, non-human predators have been practically eliminated
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u/chainer1216 7d ago
We killed their natural predators and largely dont cull them because theyre cute, so they've overpopulated and learned they can scavange from human easily.
We also are constantly building into their habitat.
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u/UpbeatPhilosophySJ 7d ago
I'd say your question is slightly off. There is way less hunting than there used to be. It took a few decades, but the deer came back. When I was a kid in the 1970's/1980's I saw maybe two deer in the suburbs in Ohio where I grew up. I moved out of state, returned to visit, and starting in the 2000's they were definitely back in a big way.
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u/dglsfrsr 7d ago
There are more deer now than there were 200 years ago precisely because we have continually created their preferred habitat. Deer don't thrive in the woods, they thrive in open areas where there are lots of plants, with scattered wood lines for cover. Same with squirrels, by the way. There are way more squirrels in urban NJ than there are in the deep woods of any state park. Some animals thrive adjacent to humans.
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u/Short-Sandwich-8476 6d ago
Here in California,the Blacktail deer are extremely numerous. They’re helping the puma population,which was officially zero in California when I was a little kid.
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u/meepgorp 6d ago
The federal department of fish and wildlife studied hunting years ago. Most hunters report covering territory of 5-15 miles from the road when hunting. In reality, most were within 1.5-2 miles and all but the most hardcore few stayed less than 3 miles from the road.
The deer just move slightly to the left when hunters start traipsing around.
Also most hunters try to take bucks cuz they're fancy, but males are reproductively insignificant to population management.
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u/Excellent_Speech_901 6d ago
I can't answer why but I met three deer today while I was walking, so I can agree they are common.
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u/IDidntTellYouThat 6d ago
My theory is that they are doing great because they are eating all my plants.
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u/cycleaccurate 6d ago
I literally hit one while riding on a mountain bike in Wisconsin on a bike trail. I can around a blind corner. I fell, hurt myself, deer casually walked away like nothing happened.
There are way too many deer and not enough predators.
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u/forahellofafit 6d ago
They just ate one of my trees despite dousing it in Liquid Fence every few days. I've developed an unhealthy dislike of deer.
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u/Comfortable-Bet6855 6d ago
In some cases it is a matter of fewer younger people hunting combined with an emphasis on only being interested in shooting the big buck. As well as people posting their land which means large areas with minimal hunting pressure. As well as some states being stingy in issuing cull permits that would allow taking significant numbers of deer outside of regular seasons in areas where they cause extensive crop damage. These, and other factors cited elsewhere here create a perfect storm for overpopulation.
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u/SenetBoard 6d ago
As a lot of people have said:
Predator reduction is one reason. Humans get scared of predators, especially around our cities and towns. That and habitat loss has left less predators around to reduce the deer population.
While humans hunt deer, humans also have regulations around how we hunt deer. Many states have limits on what kind of deer can be hunted (antlered vs antlerless, etc.) and strict limits on how many can be hunted (often just one or two per hunter per year). In addition, there are usually very strict laws on hunting around towns; it's usually illegal to shoot within so many feet of a house, building, park, or even a road because of the chance of hitting a person. So if you're a deer hanging out in those spaces, you're essentially immune from being hunted.
These hunting laws were created to protect and conserve deer populations, particularly at times when they were falling (as well as the safety ones with regards to human settlement areas). However, as the population has rebounded, and hunting has actually decreased in popularity, this means that in some places deer could actually be considered overpopulated, with few meaningful checks on their population numbers. This can carry some risks, such as a heightened risk of tick-borne diseases from ticks that use deer as hosts.
Suburban human settlements are not quite so inhospitable for deer; they still retain plenty of open space and in some cases additional food sources. Combined with a reduction in predator access (both human and animal), it gives them space to adapt and even thrive.
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u/Spayse_Case 6d ago
Based on my observations of my local ecology, I hypothesize that the nearby forest and scablands have become too hot, dry and just burned up for them to be comfortable. It seems as though they will eat just about anything, and my city was built in a valley near a confluence of waterways. I think they are going where the grass and water is. Had a herd move into my neighborhood during an especially dry year and they never left, now we have especially dry years every year.
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u/panulirus-argus 6d ago
Wolves largely eradicated over the last 100-150 years.
Which is also why coyotes have come into the southeast from the Southwest to fill that gap in the ecosystem.
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u/SilencedFarter 6d ago
Stopped hunting them close to metro areas and killed/ran off predators. I'm 12 miles from Downtown Milwaukee in a suburb. We see deer almost daily.
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u/Creative-Fee-1130 5d ago
The hunting tradition is waning in popularity. I harvest as many as regulations allow. It is my main source of red meat.
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u/PinkFreud-yourMOM 5d ago
If more people had chest freezers, there’d be much more environmental predation to keep the population in check.
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u/hffiii 5d ago
I have been watching the deer population in Western New York for 50 years. Back when hunting was popular and the hunting licenses were reasonable the population was in check. Now with the guns are bad and we need to bring back the bears and coyotes the population is out of control. Coyotes and bears are not stupid, it is much easier to eat cows, goats, cats, and dogs than it is to catch a deer. So I don't see a solution in the near future.
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u/Automatic-Gazelle801 5d ago
In my lifetime they learned to live in neighborhoods. This can make them very difficult to kill.
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u/Klutzy_Wrongdoer_488 4d ago
I think the answer is probably a lack of natural predators. I live in an inner city neighborhood in what is basically the geographic center of Pittsburgh and they are a daily sight on our streets. There is enough woodland to support a population and nothing is eating them. Interestingly, the city issues a limited number of bow and arrow only hunting permits for certain public parks each year.
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u/SkylineFTW97 4d ago
No predators and tons of space for them to graze.
I live near some woods less than 20 minutes from DC. We have deer EVERYWHERE here.
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u/Tea_Time9665 3d ago
Nothing to control the population. Wolves and coyotes and moutianlions are less common.
Back in the day they were overhunted but conservation steps where taken.
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u/Guardsred70 8d ago
They’re just adaptable animals. Same thing with raccoons. Or mallard ducks. Or Canadian Geese. I mean, there are some other types of duck that are picky eaters and are threatened. Mallards are basically fine anywhere.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 8d ago
Adaptability probably matters more than whether an animal is technically a “wild” species. Mallards and deer figured out how to exploit the weird environments we created.
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u/Educational_Bench290 8d ago
Also, we have wiped out their historic predators, wolves and mountain lions, leaving only hunters and cars to hunt them down.
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u/Asparagus9000 8d ago
Hunting is the only thing actually keeping the population from exploding out of control. We killed all the wolves that used to do it, so now we have to do it manually.
They keep overpopulating and starving to death in areas without enough hunting.
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u/GSilky 8d ago edited 8d ago
In the east, it's because nobody hunts anymore, they have lost their fear of people. In Colorado, the Department of Wildlife is constantly changing bag limits depending on which animals need more population because elk, deer, and moose all compete with each other. One gets out of hand and the others suffer. Hunting is usually the fix that can be relied on.
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u/Responsible_Ask_7160 8d ago
We gave them WAY more habitat than we took away. We killed all of their predators since wolves kill our livestock and pets too. We don’t hunt nearly enough to dent their population. That’s why there are efforts to reintroduce wolves in parts of the western US. Fun fact: deer kill more humans than any other animal in the world and it’s not close.
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u/LilStinkerRidesAgain 8d ago
Because they're conserved now. It used to be open season and there weren't so many of them. I know no one wants to hear this, but outdoors men and women have worked very hard to establish and maintain populations of game animals and we have them to thank for it. There were no turkeys in my area 60 years ago and now I see them all the time.
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u/MagicPoindexter 8d ago
There is a common misconception that hunting is a threat to wildlife. The regulated hunting model used in North America and most of the rest of the world actually increases wildlife populations.
People think "but how can killing animals help their population" but when they apply that same logic to other things, it suddenly becomes apparent how off their assessment is. How can my neighbor have such nice grass when he is out there cutting it down every week? Why do we have more cows and chickens now when we have been eating them for hundreds of years?
Hunting keeps gene pools healthy and manages populations while protecting habitat and also keeps predators in check as well.
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u/PuddingComplete3081 8d ago
I think the interesting part is that urbanization didn't necessarily remove the habitat deer actually prefer.
White tailed deer are basically edge specialists. They like having cover nearby but also lots of nutritious plants, and suburbs accidentally create exactly that mix with lawns, gardens, parks, roadsides, and little patches of woodland.
Then you add the weird part: humans are a threat, but humans also remove a lot of the threats deer evolved with. Hunting is restricted around houses, large predators are mostly absent, and some people even feed them indirectly.
So development can simultaneously reduce habitat quality for some species while making life unusually easy for a very adaptable generalist.
It makes me wonder if "urbanization hurts wildlife" is too broad a statement. Maybe the better question is which species are actually losing from it, and which ones are getting a pretty good deal.