The King's Deer
When I was in high school, our home was in a new community that a fleet of bulldozers had recently carved out of pastureland and forest; and I would eat breakfast every morning in front of a large picture window that looked out from our dining room.
As I was eating one morning, I looked up from my cereal box and observed three to four deer on the desolate patch of dirt that my parents were trying to coax into becoming a lawn. This was of some interest to me because as far as I was concerned, the nearest deer were 2,500 miles across the ocean in Yosemite. I watched them for a few minutes, my arm frozen halfway to my gaping mouth, and then it was time to get ready for school. I stood up, and the deer fled.
I didn’t tell anyone. I knew that would be a big mistake.
This was the 60s, and I attended a school that had a reputation as "the drug school.” In the 60s, virtually every public high school in Hawaii was a drug school, so if your school had somehow managed to stand out from the field and earn a reputation as the drug school, then your school definitely had a drug problem. (“Problem,” in this case, is a relative term. If our election for class president could have included write-in candidates, I can’t help but think Keith Richards would have won.)
So . . . why didn’t I tell my parents? Simple. I knew if I told them I had seen deer on our lawn, I might as well have told them Snoop Dog was herding them, and I would have been packed off to rehab faster than you could say “On Donner, On Blitzen.”
It remained my secret for two weeks. Then, one day my parents were talking, and my mother told my father that Mr. So-and-So down the street was complaining that deer were sneaking into his yard and eating the new grass shoots he had been planting. My father said something like, "Deer? He must be nuts. There aren't any deer on Oahu."
So, I said, “Hey . . . guess what, Einstein.” (OK, I didn't say "Einstein.")
For the record, there are no deer on Oahu today, but at one time there were, and the last colony was a small herd that existed in the 1960s in Moanalua Valley, two to three miles from our home. I had seen the last few individuals of that now-forgotten herd.
The deer I saw were Axis deer, and they are small and spotted and excellent swimmers, although their backstroke needs work. They are native to Sri Lanka, and the first "immigrants" to Hawaii were eight deer that were brought here in 1867 as a gift to King Kamehameha V. He had them transported to his private pasture on Molokai.
Like many new arrivals to Hawaii, the deer immediately fell in love with the islands, and if they could have, they would have all called home and said, "Sell my stuff. I'm staying."
They certainly liked the weather and the welcoming island lifestyle, but the one thing they seemed to like the most about Hawaii was that almost nothing wanted to eat them, and I suppose that's a good reason to want to stay. Back home, they had to evade alligators, wolves, jungle cats, snakes and various other deadly creatures. In fact, they lost so many of their friends to predators that, to avoid extinction, Axis deer reproduced more often than any other deer species.
New arrivals to Hawaii are usually quick to adopt local customs, but some tend to hold onto a handful of traditions they are reluctant to abandon. For the deer, the tradition they elected to keep was their ambitious reproduction rate; and, in the absence of predators, their rapid reproduction enabled their numbers to grow by leaps and bounds. And now there are so many deer that these beautiful, lithe creatures are serious pests on the three islands where they are found.
Those eight Molokai deer now number approximately 70,000. Maui has about 50,000, and Lanai has roughly 30,000. Before Oahu's herd began its decline, there were more than 1,000 on the island, and most of them lived in Moanalua Valley, where hundreds would gather in the early morning on the golf course.
So, why are they now regarded as pests? Deer eat a lot of grass, and when there are many thousands of deer on small islands, severe overgrazing and erosion can be the result. They compete for the same grasses that cattle eat; and, to make matters worse, they can carry bovine tuberculosis. In the 1980s, an outbreak of cattle tuberculosis that was believed to have been spread by deer resulted in Molokai ranchers having to slaughter all the cattle on the island, a loss of more than 9,000 head.
When deer run short of grass, they will happily substitute nearly anything that is green and growing. They have caused serious destruction to Hawaii's small farms, devouring any low-hanging fruit, such as papaya, banana, lilikoi and important native plants.
In a January 2021 article in Civil Beat, Molokai Representative Lynn DeCoite was referring to the destruction caused by roaming herds of deer when she said, "Unless you have a fence, you don't have a farm."
Molokai residents have been hunting the deer for more than 100 years, and venison is often served on their tables. The deer reproduce so rapidly, however, that hunting has not lessened the population, which only keeps growing. Sadly, there are now so many deer on Molokai that they are sickly, starving, and dying by the hundreds.
In their quest for food, they invade towns and yards in broad daylight and lay waste to homeowners' gardens. If you've ever seen one of these elegant deer (they are considered the most beautiful of all deer species), it is hard to imagine what it's like to see them starve before your eyes, but so many are now dying that private landowners and public agencies have begun using backhoes to dig pits for use as mass graves.
Collisions between vehicles and deer are also increasing. When our family was on Molokai a few years ago, we were driving away from Papohaku Beach one evening when we came within inches of crashing into a deer that emerged abruptly from the forest and darted across the road. Had it been one second slower, the "deer in the headlights" would have been the "deer in the windshield."
The eight deer immigrants 155 years ago made a wonderful gift, but they have turned out to be "the gift that keeps on giving."
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