Bounding Back From Near Extinction

Dusk is falling on the leafy mangroves, and the animals -- tame and impossibly small -- are emerging along the roadside in quest of a handout. Spying one grayish-brown mammal no bigger than a collie, Florence Wagner exits her car and slowly approaches.

“Isn’t he cute?” says the 76-year-old tourist from Kalamazoo. “We have deer in Michigan, but not like this.”

At the wheel, Wagner’s brother, Ed Ballay, 66, offers the more down-to-earth assessment of an experienced hunter: “I figure there’s about two pounds of meat to smoke on them.”

On neighboring Big Pine Key, home to about two-thirds of the herd of North America’s most diminutive deer, a scoreboard-style traffic sign used to keep track of the mournful toll of animals hit by cars. The Key deer’s plight, it seemed, was just another measure of how Florida’s delicate natural equilibrium was being disrupted by an influx of residents and visitors.

However, a recent scientific census of the deer has proved the Cassandras wrong, said Bill Miller of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the National Key Deer Refuge. The federal haven was created in 1957 for a species then teetering on the edge of extinction. But Big Pine Key now is believed to be home to as many as 800 deer, Miller said, and is at or nearing the saturation level.

“If we keep getting population increases ... we can expect to see some sort of outside impact to reduce the number of deer,” he said. “Typically, that would be disease.”

The conclusion came too late to halt $7.3 million worth of alterations to U.S. 1, the Overseas Highway that is the Florida Keys’ only surface link to the mainland. With final touches completed last month, a section of the road at the island’s eastern end now is elevated and enclosed by an 8-foot-high chain-link fence, forcing the deer to cross under it using two tunnels.

“What sense does it make to spend millions on a road overpass to save 30 deer a year when they need to die?” was the tart observation of Ann Marie Mierzejewski, a retired marketing company executive from Philadelphia who moved to the Keys two years ago. “They’re nice to have, don’t get me wrong.”

Even Chet Morris, a garrulous 10-year resident of the Keys who staffs the reception desk at the refuge’s welcome center, believes the voracious herbivores have multiplied to the point of becoming fetching, fuzzy pests. Listed by the U.S. government as an endangered species since 1967, the deer have grown fearless of humans, who often feed them from their homes or cars in violation of federal law.

“They really decimate a lawn, and will pick every blossom off a hibiscus like they’re eating chocolates from a box,” said Morris, 65. “You can’t have a garden.”

To drive away the hungry deer from his trailer and yard, Morris whacks the animals on the head with a rolled-up newspaper. “They need birth control,” he said. “There’s just too many.”

The story of the Key deer, scientists say, is a fascinating accident of geology and biology in a unique environment -- Florida’s southern archipelago of more than 800 islands spread over sparkling turquoise waters.

About 4,000 years ago, rising seas from a melting glacier marooned a number of Virginia white-tailed deer on the limestone outcroppings that become the lower Keys. Over the generations, to adapt to the reduced food supply and changed living conditions, the deer downsized themselves into the smallest of the 28 whitetailed subspecies.

Once known as “toy deer,” Key deer are no bigger than large dogs, with an adult doe standing about 24 to 28 inches at the shoulder and weighing an average of 65 pounds.

In the 1920s, the deer -- which swim between islands in search of water and food -- were found over a 60-mile swath of the southern Keys. Increasingly, they became concentrated in a six-mile range centered on Big Pine Key and No Name Key, a smaller islet to the east.

Hunting, drought, hurricanes, drownings and development had drastically thinned their numbers to as few as 27 by 1957. So the government created the National Key Deer Refuge, which covers more than 9,000 acres of slash pine forest and wetlands. It now is home to 22 federally listed endangered and threatened types of plants and animals -- five of which, including a marsh rabbit whose scientific name is a tribute to Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, are found nowhere else in the world.

In that environment, the deer rebounded. But a local real estate boom, resulting habitat loss and road kills by an ever mounting stream of automobile traffic ravaged the herd again. In 1987, when 56 animals died, a poster gloomily warned Keys residents that the deer’s numbers were declining “at an alarming rate.”

“The old philosophy said we didn’t have enough deer,” said Miller. “Now, our data [show] the population exceeding its carrying capacity.”

As evidence that the herd might be reaching critical mass, refuge employees point to the fact that they are no longer finding seedlings of a common tropical tree, the gumbo limbo. The deer lack natural predators, and so many of them now live together that tender shoots are quickly gobbled up.

To relieve pressures on the herd, the Fish and Wildlife Service plans to relocate up to 20 of the animals in the next three months -- settling them on Sugarloaf Key to the southwest. Past relocation efforts, however, were less than a dazzling success: Most deer eventually swam back because Big Pine Key is unique in possessing a year-round supply of fresh water.

The signs that seemed to tally the inexorable decline of one of America’s most at-risk species are now gone. The death count never was as precise as motorists might have believed, said Miller; in fact, the numbers were projections from a private group.

As to the transformation of the highway for the deer’s sake, “it’s working,” Miller said. Escorting a visitor through a tunnel, the refuge manager pointed at the dusty white ground and hoof tracks recently left by deer. Had the tunnels not been there, the animals might have taken their chances on U.S. 1, an artery used by 38,000 cars a day.

Since the roadway was elevated and fenced off, not a single deer has been able to get onto it, Miller said, adding: “It’s nice when a plan works.”