Deadly deer incidents don't always happen on the road

“Get down here now! I’ve been trying to reach you!” barked the voice on the phone.

Naked and wet from showering after a day of gardening, I hadn’t heard an order like that since editors summoned me to riots, car crashes and murders many years ago.

“There’s blood on the street!” added the caller – my wife Susan. “Police are here.”

Blood? Surely not on our woodsy, law-abiding block! Not where squirrels scale my oaks and deer trample my begonias. But sure enough, oozing life among my newly planted barberry shrubs was the victim – a hapless doe.

It was past working hours for the animal control officer, so Susan called police. It was the right move. After all, it’s illegal to hunt on residential streets where retirees garden and kids frolic. Or was this poor creature simply one of the 15,000 deer to be run down by cars each year in New Jersey?

But where was the car? Where was the hunter?

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A neighbor pointed across the street — to an attractive 5-foot wrought iron fence topped by spikes, some of which were dark red.

Impalement!

Deer have been known to jump 8 feet, but not always. This one got her hindquarters caught on spikes as she descended. A child ran toward the doe, causing it to struggle mightily. But by wrenching free, she hastened her own doom. Half hobbling, half crawling, the victim dragged herself across the street, leaving a trail of red to the barberries near my sidewalk.

Gruesome deer encounters are common in most New Jersey counties, especially during mating season — called the rut — which had just begun. From late August through December, bucks and does go a little crazy.

Last September in Clifton, one of these creatures leapt from an overpass and smashed through the windshield of a car on Route 3 below. Four years ago in Rockaway Borough, just two miles from my house, a panicky deer paid an impromptu visit to a pizzeria by crashing through its plate-glass window.

In Bangor, Maine, this year, a deer made headlines when it became impaled on the 8-foot fence that surrounds author Stephen King’s mansion. Local outrage spread well beyond New England. Fatal deer impalements have become so frequent that neighbors in towns from California and Ohio to North Carolina and British Columbia, Canada, have been lobbying local authorities to ban spiked fences.

Citing cost, few fence owners have agreed to replace their wrought-iron barriers. But David Cook, a California wildlife rescue specialist, has suggested a relatively inexpensive retrofit. Simply string horizontal bars across the spikes, he said.

“It looks nice,” offered Cook, after noting that “No deer survives being impaled.”

Not exactly. The New Jersey exception would be the deer spotted in 2013 just 3 miles from my house while cavorting through a Rockaway Township neighborhood with an arrow that extended from one side of its face to the other.

Biologists from the state Fish, Game and Wildlife Division tracked down the victim, tranquilized it and removed the arrow. By all accounts, this hearty creature, dubbed “Little Steve Martin,” quickly recovered and pranced back into the Rockaway woods.

But there would be no miracle for the Bambi licking its wounds in my barberries. Its injuries were much too serious and it was long past office hours for state biologists or the local animal control officer to be of much help. When local police approached her, the bleeding doe stumbled onto my driveway as a crowd gathered.

That momentarily stumped the cautious cops.

“If the shot misses and hits the driveway,” explained one officer, “the bullet could ricochet into your house or even hit someone.”

Police called headquarters requesting a pole to push the deer onto my lawn. But at 6:30 p.m., a pole wasn’t available. So cops approached with a rope. But moving the victim turned out to be unnecessary. As if to oblige her executioners, she scrambled onto a flowerbed. It took three measured shots to the body to end her misery.

The crowd dispersed in silence. I was glad a child hadn’t witnessed this sorry mercy killing. It marked the grisliest event our quiet suburban neighborhood had experienced since brake failure caused a parked delivery truck to back over its driver 25 years ago. He was delivering construction supplies that would help convert 5½ wooded acres into homes for seven families — a project the developer called Deer Run.

To my knowledge, nobody ever uses that name anymore when referring to the upper section of our block, even though a herd of 15 four-legged neighbors graze on our lawns and shrubs nearly every day. Perhaps we have to witness a large mammal’s tortuous last moments to remind us that, whether we like it or not, we live with non-voting creatures who bear legitimate claim to our space.

It’s a lesson that can be hard to learn. It’s even harder to teach — a reality that struck home when a neighbor knocked on my door two days later. He wanted to know how I got somebody to cart Bambi’s carcass away.

I explained that the county has a vendor — Space Farms Zoo and Museum in Sussex — which performs this task at no cost to the homeowner if the deer was killed on private property. The driver of the Space Farms truck said the meat is fed to the zoo’s tigers.

“But why do you need to call them?” I asked.

He said a dead deer carcass had been hanging on the fence in his backyard for several days. Vultures were tearing it to pieces and the smell was unbearable.

“It’s near my kids’ swing set,” he said. “I’m trying to explain it to them.”

John Cichowski is the retired Road Warrior columnist for The Record and NorthJersey.com

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: What happens if a deer impales itself on your fence? Who to call