Eric G. Wiley

I passed four of the 600,000 or so deer that live in Ohio on the way to work this morning. Two of them spazzed and jumped in front of my car, did some fancy footwork in the spotlights, then defied all laws of physics and reversed direction in the blink of an eye. They were probably just messing with me.

The deer are getting cocky. After millennia of being pushed around as prey animals, they've finally come into their own. No more timber wolves or cougar to eat them, less hunters, and more grazing area than ever makes Ohio one sweet buck crib.

Oh yeah, we had cougar. I found this out while researching the natural history of predators in Ohio. When I first read about cougar having been in Ohio, I wasn't very impressed. The car they named after the Cougar sucks, and I'd never heard of any joggers being killed by one. Even John Mellencamp threw the name to the curb.

[UPDATE: Added March 19, 2007] I've since learned that "Cougar" and "Puma" are just different names for the same big cat: The Mountain Lion. This new information degrades the already low quality of my writing in this article which I will leave unedited outside of the addition of this update.
[end update]

Just goes to show - don't always go with your first impressions. A little more research proved it to be a stud predator. Check what this old timey settler had to say:

The panther has a head and face like a cat, its legs are short and the paws are armed with sharp claws. It is a beast of prey of uncommon strength...Deer it is able to catch at will...It is not known that a panther has ever done the Indians injury without provocation...He must never turn his back upon the panther, thinking that he can escape.
David Zeisberger's History of North American Indians, 1779-80.

According to the Ohio History Encyclopedia, they reached an adult weight of 100-200lbs. The last confirmed sighting was in 1850, though, so one could understand why the deer have a little more swagger in the forest. They've shed the nagging inconvenience of having to run from things that will eat them while still preserving the ability to proliferate like a prey-animal [prey-animals make lots of babies].

Check the population growth rate:
1965: 17,000
1994: 400,000
2007: estimated: 700,000
National Park Service

Next November, I may just take my grandfather's hand-me-down 12-gauge and revisit my primal roots.