EXURBAN ACCELERATION

Humans are moving into the countryside, among working farms and undeveloped forest land, and into wildlife habitat, producing a landscape referred to as “exurbia.” This new landscape — a mixture of farms, forests, estates, and large-acreage suburbs dominated by the well-to-do — is creating new headaches for deer managers.According to Daniel Storm, and his research colleagues from Southern Illinois University, an estimated 10 million people were added to exurbia in the United States during the 1990s. This is considerably more than were added to urban, suburban, or rural areas.

In contrast to suburban landscapes, where wildlife habitat occurs in patches, human dwellings in exurbia tend to be more interspersed throughout wildlife habitat. In other words, the larger lots and areas of native vegetation between human dwellings makes ideal deer habitat, helps contribute to deer overpopulation, leads to increased human-deer conflicts, and makes deer herd management difficult.

Although the ecology and management of deer living in urban and suburban environments have been extensively studied, until recently, little was known about deer behavior and