Fortunately no deer in my neighborhoods, but we do have coyotes, which no one likes.

I don't have deer in town but I have plenty of water in birdbaths and lower-to-the-ground bowls for all the wildlife I get and if I lived near deer I'd provide water and apples for them. . I see them every day on the trail and I can't imagine killing such majestic sweet animals. This is their land on which we encroached.

No problem finding water around here since we live on a lake.

We have seen exponential growth in the local deer population the last few years and do nothing to intentionally attract them onto our property. Hostas and Impatiens are frequent casualties. We've been fortunate that, for the most part, the deer have ignored our 1,000+ Daylilies. I've no explanation why. We gave up vegetable gardening, with the exception of a few Tomatoes, because of the deer. Like marie_cate, we have seen over browsing by deer in the wooded areas on both sides of our property.

The tick population is also the worst I've ever seen. We do not use herbicides or pesticides because of potential runoff into the lake.

We do, we have 3, 4 foot satellite dishes that hold several gallons of water. They come every day along with other wildlife.

The stream in the little ravine across the way dries up this time of year. We have put out clean water for the deer in extraordinarily hot weather (two of the does have twins this season) as has our neighbor but we haven't seen any evidence they drink from a bucket. They do drink from the bird bath - it needs to be filled a couple of times a day some days.

We don't intentionally attract them, never feed them. These deer are so socialized though, I can walk right up to them having conversations about what they can eat and what they shouldn't. They don't listen well.

Around here, the deer start on things closer to our house (hosta, hydrangea, etc) when things they normally eat in the woods start getting scarce. It’s not for water cintent. The wild berries are mostly gone and the autumn things like persimmons aren’t ripe yet. I can count on them starting to visit around mid-August, but this year it was a couple of weeks earlier, likely due to the extreme heat this year. We do not give water as there are numerous creeks and lakes around.

maire_cate, the problem with the deer explosion in PA is the lack of hunters. Every year there are fewer and fewer hunters. My hubby, son and BIL meat hunt deer. Between the 3 of them we only need 4 deer harvested, but between them they have permits unused. You are allowed only one antler permit, but you can have multiple anterless permits. Each county dictates the number of permits issued. Farmers have a hard time getting hunters to use the red tags offered to them due to lack of hunters. My hubby turned down multiple red tags from farmers/land owners. The game commission is trying to reduce the deer population issuing more permits and longer season, but there isn't enough takers. A healthy deer population is a controlled deer population.

That's very thoughtful of you! 🦌 No. We've had rain almost every day....and...there are two ponds...large, like lakes...that are well fed.

The younger population has more empathy for animals and abhors killing.

lily316. They are just lazier. There is only so much food supply for the deer. Exploding deer population leads to unhealthy deer and death from starvation. But apparently you know more than the game commission. It isn't empathy, but cruelty to leave the deer population unchecked.

It's not only the lack of hunters but for some reason my coyote population is down too. While we have plenty of black bears in Pike County, we have very few bobcats although Penn State claims their numbers are slowly increasing. DH doesn't hunt but when my brother lived in Bucks County he would hunt my land but now that he's retired he moved back to Washington County on your side of the state. Under the DMAP program I've been granted 15 extra permits but most of them will go unused. The hunters in my area don't need extra permits, they don't have any trouble finding enough deer.

It doesn't help either that several of my neighbors feed deer even though it is illegal n PA. I have a lot of mast producing trees - oak, pignut hickory, beech, crabapple, but they are all mature trees and the deer eat any seedling that manages to pop-up. We're trying to improve the health of our woods for all wildlife and it's been very difficult.

We don't put out water for them. After years of losing fruit trees, vegetables and having my 40 rose bushes chewed to the ground, we put up 8 ft deer fence. I like to watch them from a distance.

My neighborhood is near an undeveloped hillside. We have some critters but not anything in large numbers. Some deer pass through the neighborhood from time to time and they are very unwelcome visitors. I wish there were none at all. I would NEVER put out anything to attract or otherwise encourage the presence of wild animals. Food and water shortages are natural controls to limit the size of populations of animals in each place they live.

Hunting may be a means in some places to limit animal populations, but I am very much against it. It's not a feasible control where I live anyway, I'm not out in the boondocks. If I were King, hunting would be banned and animal population control would be accomplished by trapping and relocating animals to wilderness areas if possible or by humane euthanasia if not.

^^^why?

Speaking of ticks (JRB mentioned them), I have three insect bites on my back that itch insanely. Almost excruciatingly. I thought for sure they must be tick bites. My DIL didn't see any ticks, but she said each bite has a little blister on it. This is what I see a day or so after I remove an embedded tick. So I was starting to think my back had been feeding three ticks for some days, and then a) both knees became painful and HOT, and b) I realized tick bites could explain the many ocular migraines I've had for the past week--a flare of my neuro-Lyme. So I'll call my doctor tomorrow and tell him the Tick Magnet needs a doxycycline prescription.

Meanwhile, I called the pharmacist, explained the situation, and asked if I should go ahead with my scheduled Shingrix shot tomorrow. Her response was an emphatic "No." So that's cancelled for now.

food, was your comment directed to me? If so, can you fill out your question a bit please.

I don't know if it is luck or it really works, but from spring to winter I only shower with Irish Spring. I haven't had a tick bite in years. Except for one day last week when I showered with regular body wash due to forgetting to replenish the Irish Spring in the shower and then decided to clean out bird houses. I caught it right away though before it was attached long.

My father used to put feed out for the deer at his lodge during hunting season, but I would never hunt with him. I'm not against people hunting for food, but I am against trophy hunting - that seems a bit cruel.

When I was 13, my father gave me a 22 rifle, which I did not want, and I was not even interested in shooting as target practice - I just do not like guns. I would take friends hunting on our property, because it was rather vast and remote parts of it were overrun with jackrabbits.

Once I went rabbit hunting with my father with my new gun, and I decided that I had to shoot at least once, and so I shot where I thought there were no rabbits. However, I did manage to split a barbed wire fence, and the bullet deflected and killed a rabbit. I was the only one who killed a rabbit that day. I decided then that guns were too dangerous, and I never shot my rifle again. I ended up giving it to my brother Mike, who is five years younger, and he got a lot of use out of it.

When my father killed rabbits, he gave them to people who would cook and eat them.

"I don't know if it is luck or it really works, but from spring to winter I only shower with Irish Spring"

There must be some Irish Spring mojo happening --- my sister tells me that up where she is, everyone keeps a bar of Irish Spring in their glove box to keep rodents from chewing into their car.

Lars, that is funny about the rabbit. A bank shot. Yep, trophy hunting is low. You can't eat the rack. People will even go as far as cutting the rack off of road kill and claiming it as their own kill. I've seen it many times in rut season driving up and down from camp.

There are plenty of streams around here for the deer, although the water is low. The other morning we saw ten deer in my mother’s backyard. We are just outside the Philadelphia city limits, not off in the woods, but my mom has three acres of woods. Once a year our township has a much needed deer cull. Their statistics are amazing. All sharpshooters, they kill one deer for every shot fired. Admittedly , shooting a deer around here is like shooting fish in a barrel.

I do clean and fill the bird bath and the birds seem to appreciate it. It has been so dry. We have not had anything more than a sprinkle in many weeks.

Dedtired, yep the deer are everywhere, even in the Pgh city neighborhoods and parks. The only place fairly free of them is in the downdown area. Of course that is a ⁰concrete jungle. Their in the burbs, rural, country, every area has too many. Driving at night during rut season is like playing deer dodgeball. It's rair to drive a highway and not see a dead deer.

The largest flock of turkeys I've ever seen was in the city and they did not want to move off the road.

@Alisande, I’m talking teeny, tiny ticks, not any larger than the head of a straight pin. Hundreds of them.

Deer and other things receive most of their water from what they eat. I put water out for all of the wild things. I looked at the nearby stream and could only see a couple of small areas between rocks with water in them. While the stream does dry up it normally has a pool of water under the small bridge which is dry right now. Thinking beyond right now while many of the plants are producing what appear to be seeds there is not enough moisture for those seeds to mature. I tried to plant some iris I was given last week and gave up when the ground was so hard from lack of moisture that my shovel could enter the ground about an inch with me standing on it. We had some rain Friday night which helped but we need a lot more.

Jrb. Wow that is nasty.

JRB.....that is an alarming amount of tick bites. You OK?

Itches like crazy and almost impossible to sleep for a couple of nights. Lots of Benadryl tablets and spray. This picture is from 2021 but I got into them again this summer while watering the Azaleas. I had to use a magnifying glass to see them. Makes me afraid to walk around inmy own yard.

Thanks for asking.

OMG, JRB--yes, are you OK? "Teeny tiny ticks" sound like deer ticks, which is what I'm talking about too. But I've never seen that many bites! Were you able to remove all the ticks? Do you have a way to get them tested? PA residents can send them away to be tested for the various diseases for free.

Mark that another reason I hate summer aside from the horrible droughts and melting temps. To walk up in my own yard I need to put long pants on because of ticks, poison ivy, and mosquitoes. Now I am on the prowl for lantern flies.

JRB, if it helps: I've learned to wear white cotton pants tucked into white socks (white makes it easier to see the ticks), and the socks into boots when I'm mowing or gardening. If my arms will come into contact with plants or weeds I add a white long-sleeved men's dress shirt (thank you, Salvation Army). I call it my hazmat suit, but it really has made a difference. I used to get multiple tick bites every year and have gotten infected a number of times.

Also, Rose Geranium essential oil confuses the ticks' major host-seeking sensor.

jrb, that's awful!

Interesting about Irish Spring. We stake out ivory soap to keep the deer off our plants, but I've heard that Irish Spring works too...

Alisande, these are larval ticks, with only six legs, just hatched and I’m their first meal. From my reading they’re not carriers of disease at this stage. You can acquire hundreds of them by simply brushing against a branch or clump of weeds. It takes a magnifying glass and tweezers to find and remove them.

What an honor to be their first meal, JRB. :-) I've been bitten by larval ticks, but never in such quantity. Three this year that I know of. They're less likely to carry disease, but apparently it can happen. The university that tests PA ticks tests the larvae for all the standard tick infections. All the larvae I've sent them have tested negative. But they itch as badly as ticks at any stage of development!

jrb- I've never seen anything like that and at first I thought those might be chigger bits. So after you wrote that they're larval ticks I had to look it up. Yikes - adult ticks are the size of an apple seed, the nymph stage is the size of a poppy seed - but the larval ticks are the size of a grain of sand! I've seen plenty of adult ticks, fewer nymphs but I had no idea there was a larval stage.

I agree I doubt those are ticks more likely gnats or chiggers. If those were ticks I would be seriously getting a doctor to monitor for Lyme Disease!!!! The gnats are horrid this year. Their bites are crazy itchy. I discovered the best thing for them is a hot compress or hot as you can stand shower. Seems to burn the itch out of them. The cure for ticks are fowl. They eat them right up!! That or opossum. But to the question at hand, I have several bird baths and a running fountain that I suspect are being visited by deer.🦝🤷‍♀️🦌

I have never tried this product to keep ticks out of yards, but it looks really good and safe to use as well:

https://www.wondercide.com/

There's no need to put out water for deer in my rural area. There are plenty of small ponds for them as well as plenty of crops, mast, and browse for them to eat.

I was happy to see 2 adult hen turkeys with a dozen or so poults tagging along in my backyard yesterday. The hatches have been poor the last few years and I am seeing about 1/3 of the numbers of just a few years ago.

Arcy, ticks are not the source of lyme dz. A tick requires a blood feed in each stage of its life to survive and they acquire the dz primarily from white footed mice and chipmunks who are the source. If the tick does not blood feed on a mouse or chipmunk they do not carry the dz. A larval tick is a newly hatch tick and hasn't had a blood feed yet so they are not infected with the dz .

@laceyvail 6A, WV, we have a bottle and aren't impressed. I sprayed a larval tick I spotted on my moccasin and watched it, using a magnifying glass, crawl out of the spray area. It may have eventually died but isopropyl alcohol acted much faster and at 1/20th the price.

@Arcy, JRB explained that the ticks had to be viewed through a magnifying glass and pulled out with tweezers. Have you ever heard of doing this with a gnat? I sure haven't.

Many years ago my dad gave me one of those small, high-powered folding magnifying glasses. Neither of us ever imagined it would be put to use so many times in this way.

I wonder if there's another way to remove the larval ticks. I remember reading about the bot fly and they put vaseline on the opening, they start to suffocate and leave on their own...maybe something like that would work? The other sounds so painful and tedious! They are so wee!

The Lyme organizations advise against using Vaseline or hand sanitizer or anything else that puts the tick in a state of distress because the tick will then disgorge the contents of its stomach (abdomen?), back into the host. Not a good thing to happen.

While unlikely, it is possible for larval ticks to carry infection. This is our university lab's explanation of why they test tick larvae:

Although rare, larval ticks may be infectious as some tick-borne illnesses can be transmitted from an adult tick to the eggs, which is called transovarial transmission.

We see a few deer here and there but none seems to come into our urban gardens. The population seems to be small here. We seem to have enough water in our forested area here so no need to put water out for them.

I really don't know too many people with tick bites unless they go out a little farther into the woods. Apparently ticks like tall vegetation grasses and leaves in the woods. We do have the Lyme disease carrying tick here. It is a Ixodes pacificus and Ixodes angustus, also known as western black-legged ticks.

This is an excerpt from a 2011 BC Medical Journal article.

https://bcmj.org/articles/lyme-disease-british-columbia-are-we-really-missing-epidemic

Correspondingly, rates of human cases of Lyme disease in BC are less than 0.5 per 100 000 per year; this is similar to rates reported in US states with environmental epidemiology like BC's and considerably less than in high endemic areas of the eastern United States (29 per 100000).Jun 5, 2011.

Things don't seem to have changed much according to what I've read. I feel for anyone who has this horrid disease to contend with.

I live in Bog Central now and all I end up with is mosquito bites. Heat does seem to help to stop the itch but also it helps if I break a capsule of vitamin A and spread that on the bite. I don't get welts but I get extremely itchy skin for several days that I scratch when I'm sleeping.

I use mosquito dunks in any standing water. Don't want to encourage the population. Although they don't really need me to water them since Bog land is the perfect place for them.

Just to add, there are now several other tick borne diseases, all of them bad, and at least one of them, Powassan, much worse. And one of the others is the one that gives you an alpha-gal allergy--no more red meat ever again.

There's no need to put out water for deer or other animals here. We have everything from small creeks to large lakes and rivers here, along with plenty of greenery for them to munch on. I don't think putting out a few gallons of water would help them very much. Function is correct about the need to keep the deer population under control and healthy. To leave deer alone and let them die of starvation and sickness caused by overpopulation would be horribly cruel. I do hate the trophy hunting, but I know the bucks need to be culled as well as the does. I'm a softy when it comes to animals and hate to even think about them being killed, even when it's necessary.

We put out water and apples

Taken this morning. She has two fawns. They were following her in single file, so cute, but I missed that shot.

I have not seen it published recently but about ten years ago there was a cooperative effort between the state conservation department, area officials, land owners, and bow hunters to reduce the number of deer. The seminary woods across from me was one of several areas including some parks where it happened. It needs to happen regularly. Depending on the area the meat can be used but there are several diseases, CWD and hemorrhagic types, that make it advisable to destroy it.

Even though the deer from across the street was taken to an inspected facility very little of it was accepted at any of the places that provide meals or have food pantry's. Perhaps now things would have changed with the increased interest in wild foraging but until the hunts begin happening again it is just a thought.

The hunts may be happening but are just not being mentioned to the public. I have seen the difference in health and size before and after the last known hunt and it does make a major difference.

If you live in an area where there is CWD (Chronic Wasting Disease) in the herd, you absolutely should NOT be providing food, water, salt or mineral licks for the deer.

https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cwd/transmission.html

As of June 2022, CWD in free-ranging deer, elk and/or moose has been reported in at least 29 states in the continental United States, as well as two provinces in Canada. In addition, CWD has been reported in reindeer and/or moose in Norway, Finland and Sweden, and a small number of imported cases have been reported in South Korea. The disease has also been found in farmed deer and elk.

https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cwd/occurrence.html