Family Planning Reaches the Forest

To city dwellers, wild deer are perhaps the ultimate symbol of bucolic country life. But for many who live in the country and the suburbs, the animals are little better than rats with hooves, pests that voraciously eat gardens and crops, collide with cars and play host to ticks that carry Lyme disease. From a turn-of-the-century low of 500,000, white-tailed deer in the continental U.S. have rebounded to a population of 25 million -- about as many as there were before hunting, land-clearing Europeans colonized America -- and that is just too many to coexist comfortably with modern society. Still, simply...