These deer appeared in Volunteer Park in July (Image: Volunteer Park Trust)
When my parents moved out of Seattle and to a small city North of Seattle in 2017, they took with them plans for a new garden. They didn’t realize that Anacortes is filthy with deer, nor what it meant for that garden. Deer rubbing their antlers on their precious new Japanese maples. Deer uprooting fresh plantings of flowers. Deer relaxing on lawns and chewing cud.
What does Anacortes have to do with Capitol Hill? Nothing really, but if you are anything like me, you didn’t grow up having many first-hand experiences with deer. They were animals you saw in the country, common but still kinda fun to see. Believe it or not, there are deer in Seattle and a couple of Capitol Hill’s green spaces host them. But that makes the deer that have been hanging out in Volunteer Park no less exciting.
The “deer” in question are Black-tailed Deer, Odocoileus hemionus columbianus. They are a subspecies of Mule Deer, which range all across Western North America. Go east of the Cascades and you’ll find a different subspecies, the Rocky Mountain Mule Deer. Colloquially often called just “Muleys,” they are well named, for their seemingly oversized mule-like ears. Washington is also home to White-tailed Deer, including a threatened population now restricted to Southwestern Washington.
A Mule Deer on the east side of the Cascades. (Image: Brendan McGarry)
Taxonomy aside, deer are well adapted to the openings and edges humans create with our parks and greenspaces. They can feed along the edges, where the extra sunlight means they have plenty of food options and when threatened, they can pronk back into cover. (Pronking is not a word I just made up, it’s a deer locomotion thing, a kind of bouncing leap.) And while some Mule Deer populations migrate long distances (150 miles in the case of populations in Wyoming), Black-tailed Deer don’t always migrate if they find a good place with year-round forage. Besides, they only need a few miles at most for territory, even as little as a half a mile. There’s plenty of room on the Hill for them.
Just like so many animals, people have complex feelings about deer. On the one hand, if you like animals and live in an urban space, it might be exhilarating to see a large, wild mammal. But if you live on the edge of Interlaken Park and discover that the same deer mowed down your lettuce overnight, you might reach for your hunting vest (but no, actually, don’t). Deer are also serious threats when driving in much of Washington, particularly at night. Personally I think it’s cool that deer can make it in such a dense urban neighborhood, but I have also lived in a lot of places where they were mostly considered food or pests. Are the Volunteer Park deer welcome?
Then again, these are all human concerns. Deer are just living their lives, being deer. Part of the reason they often move into places like Interlaken Park or the Arboretum, is there are less predators and a variety of foods available year-round (Anacortes and Bellingham are good examples of this in the extreme). Coyotes are certainly deer predators, but the main threat in Western Washington are Cougars, which are not making their homes on the Hill. So in places where it’s highly unlikely deer will be hunted by anyone, they can get pretty comfortable.
Of all the challenges deer pose, I can relate the most to having too many of them, even if it’s just a symptom of human influence. Deer overabundance, due to a lack of predators, can have serious impacts on native ecosystems, reducing plant diversity by stopping native plant recruitment and making way for invasive species. A little nibble here and there doesn’t kill a plant, but if a deer can sit and nibble with little worries, they can kill even established plants. Deer in our region have had profound impacts on plant communities, but we can’t exactly blame them when settlers showed up and turned everything on end, can we?
A relaxed Black-tailed Deer. (Image: Brendan McGarry)
Controversy aside, let’s admire these browsing beasts, starting with their teeth. Deer don’t have any front teeth on their upper mandible, instead they have what’s called a dental pad. This acts as a cutting board and a surface to pull vegetation with (it’s easy to track deer by their browsing sign too).
Once the food in question is in their mouth, (they’ll happily eat fruit and fungi to lichen and leaves), deer chew rapidly and swallow. Deer are ruminants and have four “stomachs,” the first of which is a fermentation chamber called the rumen. This helps them get the most out of their often high fiber diet and it also handy when they need to run away. Whatever was chewed up into the rumen is regurgitated later to further masticate.
Not surprisingly, deer are quite fast and a really motivated, fit individual can sprint up to 40 mph. Besides their pronking, they can also make pretty spectacular leaps, which is why garden fences in deer country are often at least six feet tall (if not eight). When you consider their top predator is a mountain lion, this makes sense, but it’s also useful for accessing less guarded greenery.
With a small population and a tendency to be more active at dawn and dusk, it’s no wonder many of us didn’t realize there were deer living on the Hill. You might read this and be tempted to try to spot them at Volunteer Park, which by all means, go for it. But remember, not only are deer large animals that could hurt you, they deserve our respectful distance for the simple fact that the world doesn’t revolve around us – even on the Hill.
The Volunteer Park deer are welcome to stay as long as they like
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