Dear Deer

In Ridgeview, the first neighborhood we moved to when we arrived in Park City, more than 35 years ago, there’s a house that recently errected a chain-link fence around its yard. 

We noticed it when we walked there, earlier this week, and I told my wife that such fencing was illegal within our City limits. 

Then our attention went to a two-page notice that explained why such a “diversion” had been built. I leave you with the story as it was told on the signs… 

Dear Deer, 

The buffet line is closed. Your bedroom and bathroom privileges are revoked. Enough is enough! For over 30 years we have shared this space. It was great to have one or two of you stop by every few weeks for a surprise visit. But times have changed. It is no longer a surprise. 

Now you are a herd, often numbering over a dozen, and in the winter you are here everyday. The annual cost of repairing your damage to the yard now exceeds our summer water bills. In the winter our driveway is covered in your excrement. In the spring , hundred of pounds of your waste must be racked from the yard before we can use it. 

You have eaten our Mugos to nubs, damaged more of the juniper and broken the lower branches of the spruce. It took 30 year to grow these plants. You destroyed decades of growth in days last winter. We suspect your numbers swelled when a few neighbors put out food to encourage you to visit their yards. 

They may have started modestly, but one neighbor tells me his efforts grow until he was putting out a hundred ponds of food a day for you. As the food supply grew, so did your numbers. As the food through appeared bottomless you stopped roaming and took up permanent residence. 

If the neighbors who feed you want a herd of deer in their yards, and accept the accompanying damage, that is their choice. We no longer accept the costs their actions have imposed upon us. This diversion is to help you break your habits and protect our vegetation. 

When you need to sleep, defecate, wrestle, or just want to taste a real plant again instead of food from a bag, go down the street and indulge yourself in someone else’s yard. 

P.S. We had a similar challenge with ducks a few years ago and put up a diversion from them. The ducks learned very quickly. Within a few weeks, they stopped coming through our yard. You deer have much bigger brains than ducks. You figure this out. Show us how fast you can learn! 

P.P.S. We would rather not have this diversion, but it has become necessary to protect the vegetation from ravenous, artiodactyl ungulates. The low junipers were eaten to nubs two years ago. Extensive watering brought some of them back, but is expensive and laborious. The Mugo pine you see was stripped to a height of over seven feet. It is never going to recover. Another Mugo ten feet to the east was completely denuded and had to be cut down. We replaced the Mugos with Arborvitae this spring as supposedly deer do not like to eat Arborvitae. Well they did not eat them, but the deer destroyed several of them two weeks ago rubbing the velvet of their antlers. We have had enough. We are protecting the vegetation. 

P.P.P.S. We have spoken to our neighbors about their compulsion to feed wildlife. Several people tell us they have called the DWR. After a few weeks or months, the neighbors seem to start putting out food again. This diversion seemed both more polite and more expeditious that filing another report with the DWR.