Invaders threaten capital

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Department of Homeland Security may want to get on top of the deer situation in the nation's capital.
A terrorist disguised as a nice-sized buck could do some serious damage. The deer can -- and do -- go anywhere. That includes showing up in downtown Washington not far from the White House inside -- INSIDE -- supermarkets and boutiques in heavily built-up Georgetown and, just recently, the cheetah enclosure at the National Zoo.
The mother cheetah, in a kind of back-in-the-day demonstration for the baby cheetahs, hopped on the deer's back, but the deer shook it off and fled the enclosure.
News accounts did not address the question: If the deer could get out, couldn't the cheetah get out, too? Perhaps the cheetah regards the enclosure as protection from roving bands of deer seeking revenge for generations of predation by really fast carnivores.
Now, the National Zoo is hardly the forest primeval. It sits right in Washington, a few subway stops from the White House. And, while the grounds are bucolic, the zoo is surrounded on three sides by large apartment buildings.
The reason I invoke homeland security is that less than a block from the department's headquarters I got caught one evening rush hour in a traffic jam caused by a herd of deer milling around on Massachusetts Avenue. One deer walked into my car and, puzzled, backed off and walked into it again. Although there's a park there, this is not some rural byway, but an extension of Embassy by gosh Row.
The big fear, of course, is hitting one with a car and finding yourself with a lapful of broken glass and shredded venison, maybe at considerable damage to yourself and certainly to your car. The inner suburbs where I live are estimated to have 200 deer per squLast fall, I encountered a herd of a dozen or more deer across the street from the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, not generally thought of as a prime deer habitat. The wildlife people say the deer are motivated by food and sex. As one might observe, who is not? But these deer weren't eating or mating, they were just hanging out like punks on a street corner. Homeland Security better start asking the hard questions.are mile.
Deer in the headlights
Coming home the other night, late enough so that the parkway was empty, I picked up a line of roadside reflectors in my high beams, only the last reflector was winking on and off. It turned out to be the eye of a large deer standing by the roadside. I slowed and slowed, waiting for the deer to make a move. The deer waited until I had come to a full stop and then bolted in front of the car.
Maybe the deer do this deliberately. Maybe they get bored eating people's flowers and shrubs -- the same old flowers and shrubs day after day -- and get a huge adrenaline rush by seeing how close they can come to onrushing cars.
About every organized method of deer control comes with insuperable political or logistical drawbacks, leaving what control there is largely to random collisions with vehicles. But Mother Nature may be at work on her own solution.
A guy with pretty good wildlife credentials says he saw a red wolf in our neighborhood. Red wolves eat deer. I'm not sure that howling packs of wolves loping through the backyard is an ideal solution, but it has a certain appeal -- if the wolves will promise to stay off the roads.
Scripps Howard News Service