This morning like most mornings I got out of bed at 5:15, got dressed to go out for a walk and immediately got a flashback from Nam because there is a monsoon outside. In Nam I had no choice and had to live in it but here I have a nice warm house so I decided not to walk today.
I decided to bake muffins like I often do for a few reasons. I like them, my wife likes them and I can't go out so what else an I going to do at 4:15?
As I am waiting for them to bake I was thinking of all the times I do walk in the morning and all the deer I see so early. These things are all over the place. I wish purple tangs were so common.
Most people here think of the deer as a big problem because they don't look both ways when they cross streets and don't make good hood ornaments.
I am quite sure the deer think of us as pests but I am guessing as although I can read the mind of a copperband butterfly, deer minds confuse me and I don't get much incite from what they are thinking. Looking into the black eyes of a deer is like looking into the eyes of a flounder. Not much going on.
They did put "Deer Crossing" signs all over the place but many times the deer ignore those signs and cross the streets in other places.
Over the years there have been plans on how to limit the numbers of deer but with 4 or 5 million people with opinions, nothing gets done. It's like fish forums, everyone has an opinion and the outcome is almost always to change the water.
At one time the government hired hunters to cull the population. Of course that is only a temporary solution and people cried out about the cruelty.
I myself don't shoot deer or even deer ticks and also don't like that idea. I don't eat deer meat but I do eat hamburgers which are humanly grown in a supermarket
Even if they killed 100 deer, there are tens of thousands of them and more of them get hit by cars than that every month.
There was a plan to feed the deer birth control pills. They would drop bales of food by helicopter laced with birth control pills.
That didn't work because the way a deers hoofs are built, they have a hard time getting the pills out of those little round plastic containers they come in and the deer never knew what day it was so even if they could pry the pills out, the dosage was off.
Also the bucks, or male deer were eating them and it started to make them grow long eyelashes and many people would complain that when they were watching Oprah, the deer would look at the TV through their window instead of running after females like bucks are supposed to do.
There is an Island here called Shelter Island and a lot of wealthy people lived there. Many of them got rich from whaling. (They killed all the whales then started to kill other things but that is for another useless thread.) Anyway they wanted to grow gardens and they couldn't because the deer would eat everything, so the residents came up with a plan.
The Island isn't that big so they hired these people to come to the Island with huge fishing nets. They got a few hundred people and started walking the nets through the Island trying to force the deer all to one side where they would have a barge waiting. The idea was to herd the deer onto the barge and let them go on the mainland. (Originally they were going to shoot them but the people started protesting. They figured it was much more humane to pry the poor animals from the grill of a 1929 Oldsmobile )
At first it looked like it was working and almost all the deer were in the nets going on to the barge. Thats when the Island occupants learned that deer could jump six feet and swim like Johnny Weissmuller (Tarzan)
There were Deer swimming all around the Island and the Coast Guard had to be called to chase the deer out of the water because now they were a hazard to navigation. Inadvertently, all the deer ended up back on the Island and now, after swimming all day they were hungry so the little vegetation that was still on the Island was quickly devoured by the deer.
Now the Island residents were here.
