Deer Sightings In Bayside Spark Confusion Among Neighbors

BAYSIDE, QUEENS — Lauren Jeberg was traveling on the Cross Island Parkway last Sunday when she spotted something from the passenger seat window of her car that she’d never seen before.

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw it coming off the exit,” Jeberg told Patch of the deer that she spotted darting along a strip of grass by the parkway.

Jeber, who's lived in northeast Queens for eight years, said that the deer surprised her and her husband, who was behind the wheel at the time. He’s lived in Little Neck for 40 years and has never seen a deer before this one, she said.

These sightings, however, are becoming more common in northeast Queens, where many neighbors are seeing deer for the first time ever, mostly near the Cross Island Parkway, which abuts Alley Pond Park.

The sightings began in mid-July and increased in earnest throughout August. During the week of Aug. 20, Baysiders posted daily deer-sighting photos in neighborhood Facebook groups for four days in a row.

Risako Yamamoto, who's been living in Bayside for nearly 15 years, also spotted a deer off the Cross Island Parkway for the first time this week. She pulled up on a right-side lane and saw the animal behind the guardrail.

“When I saw it, it was just hanging out, watching the cars going by,” she said.

The two women’s posts, and a couple others, garnered hundreds of comments from Baysiders.

Some were confused to see deer in the area, and implored neighbors to call animal rescue organizations.

Others said they’ve seen deer near Bayside’s parkland their whole lives (“in other news, I saw a fish in the water by the marina. Who should I call?” mocked one), and told people to focus on driving.

One neighbor even suggested that the posts were a safety risk for the deer, inadvertently informing area poachers about their whereabouts.

Despite different opinions, the comments suggest that hundreds of Baysiders are wrapped up in the drama of urban deer sightings — a conundrum that’s increasingly coming up across the five boroughs, and other cities, as the animals return to their once-forested, now-urban stomping grounds.

New York City’s white-tailed deer population

Katrina Toal’s voice perks up when she talks about spotting deer in New York City.

“I see deer all the time, but I'm still excited when I see them,” Toal, the deputy director of NYC’s Parks Department’s wildlife unit, told Patch, alluding to the teeming deer population in Staten Island, where she lives.

Toal, however, doesn’t see eye-to-eye with all New Yorkers when it comes to deer sightings.

In her home borough of Staten Island, for instance, some people would like to hunt deer themselves to reduce the population of over 1,5000, in lieu of the city’s multi-billion-dollar, and widely debated, deer vasectomy program.

Deer are, perhaps surprisingly, well suited for suburban and urban areas, Toal said.

They can eat “pretty much any kind of vegetation,” and love edge habitats “like where your forested neighborhood park meets the grass growing on your front lawn,” she explained.

Those factors, combined with their lack of predators, ability to reproduce quickly, and migratory abilities, have made them an at times unwelcome mainstay of suburban and urban areas, New York City included.

The Parks Department monitors populations of white-tailed deer in the north Bronx and Staten Island, which expanded into the areas amid postwar suburbanization in the 1940s and ‘50s, but there’s not an established population in Queens — anecdotal sightings aside — Toal said.

“We don’t really know if these deer [in Queens] are permanent residents in this area or if they’ve made an appearance from Long Island,” she said, pointing to the established deer populations in nearby counties.

“We’ll have to wait and see if [the deer in Queens] become established, or if they’re just visitors from Long Island,” she said.

During the past two summers however, Toal said that the Parks Department has gotten more reports of deer in northeast Queens — which doesn’t surprise her, since she thinks the deer might be coming to Alley Pond Park to “take advantage” of the lush greenland as they bulk up for winter

And, it especially doesn’t surprise Toal to hear of more baby deer — known as fawn — sightings at the end of summertime.

“Female deer have their fawns at the beginning of summer or late spring, and at that point the fawns really just stay in one spot, but by August those fawns are getting older, they’re getting more independent, and they’re looking for food on their own,” she said.

Like most young wildlife, however, fawns are “a little more curious and not as smooth acting as adult deers,” which can result in “deer-vehicle collisions,” as Toal puts it — one of the most disruptive aspects of living with deer in urban areas.

Living with deer in New York City

Deer, like any New York neighbors, can be challenging to coexist alongside, but that’s just part in parcel of living in New York City — at least according to the multi-agency animal awareness campaign, dubbed WildlifeNYC.

The campaign, which seeks to teach human New Yorkers how to coexist with their animal neighbors, features images of deer, coyotes, raccoons, hawks, and plovers on a backdrop of the city skyline and the label “New Yorker.”

“City dwellers take many forms,” read the campaign posters, which in 2016, were hung as billboards, banners, and bus stop posters around the five boroughs.

The message, albeit cheeky, was a success, according to the campaign.

Deer-car collisions, for instance, fell to 35 in 2020, from 63 in 2016, according to the latest available statistics from WildlifeNYC. Those numbers, however, solely reflect data collected on Staten Island and are less than the number of crashes recorded by other city agencies, reports show.

Toal says that in order to reduce collisions, drivers who see a deer should practice what are widely considered to be best-practices for driving in general: use your headlights to see better at dusk and dawn, when deer are most active, scan the road ahead of you, and drive the speed limit.

“If you see a deer running in front of your vehicle you should brake firmly but don’t swerve,” Toal advises. “If you’re swerving you could end up going into oncoming traffic or off the road.”

As for pedestrians, Toal recommends they not feed deer, since doing so can hurt the animals’ stomachs and increase the likelihood that they’ll cross roads in order to return for more food.

She also suggests that people on foot give deer space. Everyone should remember that they are wild animals so for the safety of that deer and yourself you should maintain a safe distance,” she cautions.

“I like to remind people that you're not going to get a good deer picture on your iPhone, if you're getting a good picture on your iPhone you are way too close to any wild animal,” she said.