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Battling Bambi - Page 12

© Marge Talt

If you can afford automatic gates on your drive, you'll save yourself an infinity of trouble in having to get out of the car to open and close them. It is vitally important that family and visitors are trained to keep the gates shut except when they are actually passing through them. I had thought I'd be able to leave them open during the day and just close them at night. Wrong!. It didn't take Bambi a week to discover that those gates were open and invite herself in for a bit of a mid-day treat.

Cattle Guards

There is one alternate to gates on your driveway. That's installing a cattle guard. This is feasible if your driveway is relatively flat.

A cattle guard is a grid, usually of parallel metal bars, set at ground level in a road or gateway. It serves a barrier to any hoofed animal while allowing passage of vehicles and pedestrians. Hoofed animals won't cross one because they fear they will get a hoof caught in the spaces between the bars. To make sure deer don't just jump across it, it must be at least seven feet (2.13m) from front to back and more is better.

Deerproof Plants

There must be a hundred lists of deer resistant plants on the web. Keep in mind that a hungry deer will eat anything. What one herd leaves, another devours. Spines are a deer condiment; they have leather mouths. They generally leave very aromatic or fuzzy foliage alone, but not always. Your herd may ignore one plant for years and then develop a taste for it.

A deer needs to eat between five and twelve pounds (2.26 - 5.44kg) of food per day. They are ruminants with four compartment stomachs, allowing them to feed rapidly, since they don't have to chew food thoroughly as they browse, then find a safe spot to lie down and chew their cud. This is an advantage in the survival game, because they are vulnerable to predators while feeding.

They feed on a variety of vegetation; whatever is available in their habitat. They eat buds and twigs as well as leaves. Maple, sassafras, poplar, aspen, birch dogwood, oak, witch hazel, sumac, willow, snowberry, sweetfern, hemlock, greenbriar, pine, fir, wintergreen, arborvitae, apple (they love apples) and other shrubs are eaten in wooded areas. In winter they depend a great deal on mast - acorns, beech nuts, etc. In desert areas they eat yucca, prickly pear cactus and other tough shrubs. They will eat conifers in winter when other food is scarce.

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