MAYFAIR, Sask. – Last week Gilbert Holmes passed a field where a doe was being bred, months after breeding should have ended.
Hearing this bothered Mayfair elevator operator Brian Wilson, who is sure both the doe and its fawn will die when the snow falls next autumn and mother and child are too weak to face the harsh conditions.
“Anybody who knows anything knows that ain’t good,” he said on a recent Saturday afternoon, sitting across the office table from Holmes.
The two were discussing the local deer population, which numbers in the thousands and has been feeding on swathed crops still laying in fields and hay set aside for cattle.
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Compassion for animal
Holmes said he doesn’t mind the deer eating dozens of his bales over the winter.
“I love them. I’ve looked after them for 10 years,” he said.
But Wilson points out a lot of area producers aren’t as happy feeding the animals.
“Don’t take his words literally,” he said. “You ask the other farmers that are short of hay and you’ll get another story.”
And, indeed, around the town the fields are teeming with deer. Some groups of 20 or more brazenly dine on uncut alfalfa or swathed cereals in the bright sun of midday, clearly visible from town. The deer don’t seem particularly bothered by nearby human activity.
The terrain here is typical of parkland areas, dotted with thick patches of trees. And in amongst the trees, camouflaged shapes of less presumptuous deer can be seen waiting for dusk to fall.
Hay corrals don’t provide much of deterrent. White-tailed deer spring easily over most fences.
Throughout the area, bales are left in fields away from hay storage areas to draw animals away, but they have little effect.
Still enjoy animals’ beauty
Yet all the damage hasn’t turned Wilson into a deer-hater.
There is one thing he and Holmes agree on: The beauty of deer.
“They’re the best animals around,” said Holmes.
Wilson is unable to sum up his feelings for the animals.
“If you’ve ever seen them glide over a five-foot fence, just glide over, it’s like, I don’t know how to describe it. They’re beautiful,” he said.
In Holmes’s hay corral many of the bales have been chewed ragged by deer, as they tear off the top layer to get to the green interior that makes better eating.
Holmes estimated deer cost his farm about $100 day in hay alone, but seeing this money trickle away hasn’t embittered him.
Even deer have to eat, he said.
It’s a common sentiment repeated throughout the area, even though most producers are clearly exasperated by the damage deer have caused. Although all agree some sort of compensation from the government is in order.
On the Holmes farm, Gilbert’s son Dave and local wildlife association president Craig Taylor see an irony in some people’s perceptions that farmers don’t like deer.
The two engineers say they’ve gone through original survey maps of the region and say there are more trees there now than there were before the homesteaders came.
Once the land was settled, the prairie fires that used to sweep the land disappeared, and over the past century trees have been moving in, creating ideal deer country.
“The deer’s best friend is the farmer,” said Taylor.
