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1893 — today
The disappearance: The animal that opens this section — Castleman's drove of forty-five — is also the state restoration program's founding fact. The Indiana DNR's deer history, as carried on the Allen County deer page, runs in dated lines: the last reported wild deer in Indiana was killed in Knox County in 1893, and Indiana then spent four decades with no deer at all. The causes the record gives are the two that run through this whole section: unregulated hunting and the conversion of woodland to farmland.
The return: From 1934 to 1942, the Department of Conservation purchased deer for release from Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina — 296 deer in the DNR timeline's figure; the Division's own deer history narrative says "about 400," and both figures are printed here as the record gives them. By 1943 the state population was estimated at 900. The first modern deer season, in 1951, was the first in 58 years — three days in November — and a trapping and relocation program began moving deer in 1956. Northern Indiana's herd, the Division's history adds, was substantially rebuilt by deer immigrating from Michigan on their own, moving down the major drainages — the same river corridors the bobcats are using in this century.
The present: The arc ends inverted. Indiana's annual deer harvest has exceeded 100,000 since 2015, and the DNR harvest data carried on the county page put Allen County's own take at over 1,600 deer in a recent season. Deer are now a documented presence inside the city itself — a deer exploring Fort Wayne's emptied streets in April 2020 was filmed by the city and carried by ABC News — and Eagle Marsh's winter habitat is managed, in the Little River Wetlands Project's words, as ideal deer cover. The animal the county paid to exterminate in scalps' company is now the one its drivers and gardeners negotiate with.
Sources:
- Indiana Department of Natural Resources, white-tailed deer history and timeline (1893; 1934–42 releases; 1943 estimate; 1951 season; 1956 relocations), as carried on the Society's "Deer in Indiana" Allen County page, acgsi.org; Indiana DNR / Wildlife Conflicts Information Hotline, "Deer" (the southern release program and Michigan immigration into northern counties).
- City of Fort Wayne, video post, 24 April 2020 (the downtown deer), via the Society's deer page.