BobHarris.com - Friday pudublogging: a trip to the "National Key Deer National Wildlife Refuge"

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Friday pudublogging: a trip to the "National Key Deer National Wildlife Refuge"

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Thursday, 10 February 2005

Say hello to North America's nearest equivalent to the pudu: the Key deer.

These guys are just a little bigger than a pudu, and found only in the Florida Keys. Like anything tiny and wonderful these days, they're endangered, with only about 800 of them in existence.

They're also known as toy deer, and for a lot of years a lot of people thought it was really fun to drive down to Florida and shoot them. I will never live long enough to understand that. At one point, there were probably only 27 of them left in the whole world.

Fortunately, they're now protected and have a refuge where they're doing OK.

A couple of years ago, this little one and I crossed paths while we were both wandering a refuge-adjacent residential neighborhood on Big Pine Key, about 100 miles southwest of Miami, not far from the headquarters of what the government's website actually calls in one spot the National Key Deer National Wildlife Refuge.

I like to think they use the word "National" twice on the top ("National Key Deer NWR," it says) to make the Key deer feel extra important.

This adorable little creature was hungry and tame enough that it actually walked right over and started licking my hand, almost certainly just for the taste of salt and hope for an easy handout.

Well. I wanted to pick it up and start dancing, if you must know.

But it turns out it's a really bad idea to let them get this close. If deer get too relaxed around humans, they're more likely to get hit by cars, become dependent on people food (which is bad for them anyway), and develop lousy diseases (since parasites can more easily hop from deer to deer if they're all hanging out near human stuff).

So I'm glad I didn't feed this fellow anything, and I only held still long enough to get a picture and maybe another minute to enjoy the sheer tiny-deer-ness of it all. I probably shouldn't have even stayed that long.

But I challenge anyone not to just stand there and grin for a minute when something this cute is trying to lick your hand.