In the past few weeks I have seen a lot of deer. I have seen them popping up on social media, on campus and as road kill.

Human intervention

Ironically when we were talking about the issue of deer overpopulation in class last week, a video of an injured deer came up on my timeline when I checked Facebook during our mid-class break. In the video the baby deer seems to have a broken leg and a man rescues it and nurses it back to health. Once healed, the man tries to return the deer to his mother but at first fails because the deer is so attached to him. The video is no doubt adorable but should he have gotten involved in nature and healed this deer? Wouldn’t it be more”natural” if the deer was left alone to either heal on its own or die? If you want to check out the video here is the link! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga2TOCb4SKw

Deer at Laf

Although our campus is a very controlled form of nature, the real nature still makes its way onto campus despite our efforts to keep it away. I have seen deer multiple times on the stairs down to the arts campus but the other week I saw a deer right by Ruef Hall.Before reading Nature Wars and before our discussion in class, I thought that spotting this deer was refreshing because I could see nature on our controlled campus. However, after my new knowledge on deer I am starting to think that seeing this deer was not as magical as I originally thought it was. These deer are everywhere and are adapting to our new suburban environments. So this deer probably made its way onto campus because it saw lush green grass to eat. So maybe I should actually be sad about seeing this deer on campus because their populations are exponentially growing in suburban areas but are missing in the forests.

Roadkill

Seeing roadkill is never fun but either its increasing or I happen to notice it more myself. Either way I don’t like it when I see it. I am aware that humans and nature are constantly butting heads but roadkill is a flat out example that animals died from accidentally colliding with humans. The same may be said for hunting but at least the hunters are prepared for it to happen and went in knowing that’s what they wanted to happen. With roadkill, both species involved are completely caught off guard and should the animal die, the human may feel guilt and sadness because that was not their intention.

I most often see deer roadkill  when I am coming around in the bend on 22 before the exit into the City of Easton. I suppose this is because deer inhabit the cemetery and wooded area on one side as well as the Karl Sterner Arts Trail on the other. However, in between there is a very fast moving highway and deer (as well as other species) have no hope should they encounter this road. The most memorable experience I have of seeing a dead deer on this road was when I was driving back to campus from Target. I glanced over to the side of the road and accidentally caught eyes with the dead black eyes of a deer laying on the side of the highway. As Ginny mentioned in class today, I saw the green fire had long been extinguished in this deer as it lay lifeless on the side of the road.

Maybe there is a way that we can make sure that deer and other species have a way to navigate from place to place and bypass fast-moving roads without being killed. On Facebook I have seen the idea of a animal highway.

This would be a greenway that is on top of an overpass and allows animals to cross between their different habitats. This idea sounds great because when you think about it roadkill is not the only problem of highways. They separate species and create little islands of nature. As time passes these species in different “islands” may adapt differently and evolve differently. So if humans can intervene by building these animal crossings maybe we can prevent this from happening. It would be difficult to build such a structure and maybe the roadkill spot of 22 is too small scale for such an idea but on the surface this idea sounds good to me! No matter what, humans will intervene with and impact nature so ideas like this highway will make our impact maybe just a little bit smaller. At this point I think we need to get over the fact that humans are impacting nature and come up with solutions to reduce how much we impact it.