Refuge Key to survival of Florida’s tiny key deer

They were miniature deer. Bambis, but not babies. Barely taller than the multicolored chickens skittering around these Lower Keys.

My friend John and I were squatting in front of a dozen endangered Key deer that were foraging on plants and handouts next to the Big Pine Key Lion’s Club. I had extended my hand in an attempt to get closer, also aware that the animals might approach because they thought I had food; near us two Canadian-accented seniors were tossing them popcorn even though feeding the deer is illegal and unhealthy (for the deer).

On Big Pine Key and the surrounding islands live up to 800 Key deer, a subspecies of the white-tailed deer that bound throughout much of North America. These tiny, tawny ruminants weigh about 70 pounds, with does standing only 26 inches high at the shoulders and bucks standing 30 inches high. Scientists theorize that white-tailed deer migrated here when most of the Keys were connected by nature, not by the frenzied Overseas Highway (U.S. 1).

When glaciers from the Wisconsin ice age melted 10,000 years ago, oceans rose and turned Florida’s southern highlands into islands. All creatures that couldn’t swim or fly were stranded. Adapting over the millennia to their small-islands habitat, the species shrank in size. And then came the humans. By 1957, when the 8,600-acre National Key Deer Refuge was established, only 27 Key deer were living.

Two of the animals coyly sauntered toward my outstretched hand then stopped three feet away and stared. One was a fawn, and I guessed the other was its mother. The fawn’s coat was dappled black, gray and white, and its mom’s was light brown. The mom twinkled her nose at me before she and the fawn darted away.

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