Welcome to DEERLAND! While you’re here, be sure to visit my blog and join in the conversation. If you’d like to get in touch with ideas, suggestions, or just plain musings about deer, please contact me. I’m all deers.
Meanwhile, here’s the scoop on DEERLAND…
My next book, DEERLAND (Lyons Press), is about the major role deer play in the environment and in our culture. Truly, we live in DEERLAND.
Here in North America, overabundant deer have the ability to reshape their environment more radically than any other creature but us humans. Meanwhile, our complex relationship with deer makes for a twisted tale of love, obsession, and consequences. Out in the woods, new stories are waiting to be told.
I’ll admit… It’s easy to underestimate the role deer play in the environment, our culture, and even our economy. But it’s no coincidence that we call our national currency a “buck.” Around 150 years ago, one dollar was the going price for one buckskin. (Unfortunately for hunters, but fortunately for deer, that price has not kept pace with inflation.) Historians tell us that in 1621, not a single morsel of turkey was served at the first Thanksgiving. The main course was venison.
Today, numbers alone can tell a story. The U.S. now has over 30 million deer, a hundred times more than were here just a century ago. Their densities per square mile in America’s suburbs and parks have at times reached 100 in Chicago, 125 in Minneapolis, 182 in parts of New Jersey, 200 in Kansas City, and 400 in Washington, D.C.
Last year an estimated 1.5 million deer-vehicle crashes resulted in about 150 human fatalities, over 10,000 injuries, and insurance payouts of over $3.8 billion. The total cost for vehicle repairs and medical or funeral bills was undoubtedly far higher. Each year, the CDC reports 30,000 confirmed cases of Lyme disease (carried by deer ticks, in turn carried by deer), with actual infection rates estimated at over 200,000. Each of our 30 million deer eats an average of 3,000 pounds of vegetation per year, with farm crops often making up over 85% of that amount.
We do, of course, fight back. Around 15 million Americans hunt deer every year. Deer hunting accounts for an annual $12.4 billion spent on travel and equipment, $7 billion in salaries and wages from 250,000 jobs, and over $2 billion more in license fees and state, federal, and local taxes. If deer hunting—not all hunting, just deer hunting—were a single corporation, its revenues would earn it a spot in the top 200 of the Fortune 500. The most conservative comparisons place it in the same pack as CBS, Sun Microsystems, ConAgra, Pepsi, and General Mills.
Every November, in just my home state of Wisconsin, over 600,000 hunters head out into the woods on the opening morning of deer season. Although equipped only with small arms, they’d rank as the world’s sixth-largest active standing army—just ahead of Pakistan, South Korea, Iran, and Turkey, and behind only China, India, Russia, North Korea, and the U.S. Add to their number the deer hunters just across the border in either Minnesota or Michigan, and they’d instantly vault into second place, behind only the People’s Liberation Army of China.
Despite the best efforts of these orange and camo-clad armies, overabundant deer continue to disrupt entire ecosystems more than any other wild animal on the continent. Even if we spend a fair amount of time in the woods, most of us have never seen a forest that’s not shaped by deer. Still, when forced to choose between whitetails and other wildlife, we almost invariably choose deer. (For many hunters, in fact, the phrase “overabundant deer” is a puzzling oxymoron.)
In DEERLAND, I’ll explore these stories and more. I’ll take you on a journey through America’s forests, farms, and suburbs. Along the way, you’ll meet quirky characters, explore hidden subcultures, and learn how the effects of a gluttonous deer’s dinner echo and reverberate through an entire ecosystem.
Clearly, our complex relationship with deer reveals a great deal about America—and also about us Americans. DEERLAND will be the definitive new book on the subject. In it, I’ll tell an environmental, political, social, and economic story.
Yes, this is a story about deer. Most of all, however, it’s a story about us.
