Deer attack three people on Carbondale campus

CARBONDALE, Ill. -- Deer are blamed in attacks on three more people on Southern Illinois University's campus, a year after at least seven students and staffers were threatened or injured by overly protective mother does during fawning season, police said Wednesday.

The latest encounters happened separately Tuesday afternoon within minutes of each other on a footpath along Campus Lake, prompting assumptions that the same doe was responsible, said Todd Sigler, the school's public safety chief. Two of the victims sought medical treatment.

The recent attacks were earlier in the fawning season than a series of them that came last June. Then, three attacks by possibly different deer sent four people to the hospital, also mostly with minor injuries. The spring fawning season generally peaks in June.

Officials attribute the encounters to a combination of protective motherly instinct, squeezed habitat and, in some cases, a little too much human curiosity.

Concerned about last year's cases, SIU officials last week launched a public-awareness campaign to implore anyone on the 20,000-student campus to watch out for deer, to not approach the animals and, if a wild-eyed deer starts bounding their way, run.

Some of last year's attacks may have been avoided if the victims hadn't tried to approach a fawn, Sigler said.

"We did have a couple of instances last year where they were trying to shepherd the deer across the road, and that did not work out well," he said.

But Sigler said there was no evidence those injured Tuesday provoked the deer.

All of it has police and wildlife pros scratching for answers.

"It's bothersome," Sigler said. "We certainly appreciate the deer, and we don't want to get rid of them. At the same time, we don't want people getting injured. It's a difficult situation."

Sigler said Tuesday's attacks happened in such rapid succession that all of them were reported in one call to police.

Tuesday's victims included a 30-year-old SIU worker who got a gash on his forehead that required stitches, while a 46-year-old school employee escaped with a sprained wrist and various cuts and bruises, police said. The deer scratched a 58-year-old student's jaw.

Police used barricades to close off the path, which encircles the campus lake, and they advised pedestrians to avoid the area; handwritten signs by the path read, "Caution: Deer attacks." The area is less than a mile from the school's thickly forested Thompson Woods and its paved trails where many of last year's victims were confronted by deer.

"The options explained to us last year -- relocating the deer, tranquilizing them, thinning them out -- all come with a downside," Sigler said. "We're going to try this education approach first and see what happens."

That awareness drive includes a seminar today titled "Avoiding Deer-Human Encounters of the Third Kind on Campus."

SIU wildlife ecologist Clay Nielsen and other researchers also have launched a two-year effort to count the deer, pinpoint how the animals affect the campus' ecosystem and gauge what locals think of them. Nielsen says the study will offer no recommendations on what to do about the deer.

"Before last year, no one really had heard of this sort of thing," Nielsen said last week. "It's the result of having a beautiful campus that we have to deal with wildlife."

Walking through the Thompson Woods on Wednesday, Jane Swanson talked of how people joked last year about the deer issue, saying that they were more worried about wildlife than muggers.

But the chair of the school's psychology department says it's no longer a laughing matter.

"It makes sense that these poor deer are trying to protect their newborns, but we've got to figure out something other then just avoiding the deer," she said.

While attacks on humans during fawning season appears rare, deer on a college campus apparently isn't. At the University of Wisconsin's 700-acre campus in Green Bay, archers brought in the last two weeks of April killed 14 deer from a roaming herd estimated to number 40 to 50. Though not blamed in any attacks there, deer were considered troublesome because of their damage to vegetation, hazard to motorists and their potential role in spreading Lyme disease and other illness.