Wait'll those Austrian bears get a load of this.

Belleville News-Democrat: SIUC braces for deer attacks against students

CARBONDALE - Tammy Emery once thought of deer as docile and darling. A chance encounter a year ago with a hard-charging Bambi changed all that.

The 31-year-old secretary was among at least seven people threatened or injured by female deer last year on Southern Illinois University Carbondale's campus, prompting the school to wage a broad public-service campaign this approaching fawning season to prevent further attacks.

Experts say the combination of instinctively protective mother deer, squeezed habitat and, in some cases, the merely curious made for a dangerous situation in a sprawling wooded patch with trails in the midst of the 20,000-student school's campus.

The message now: Keep your eyes peeled for deer, don't approach them and, if a wild-eyed deer starts bounding your way, run in the opposite direction.

"Before last year, no one really had heard of this sort of thing," said Clay Nielsen, an SIUC wildlife ecologist whose research on deer attacks following last year's incidents uncovered few other examples elsewhere. "It's unusual."

Nielsen believes different deer were responsible for the three attacks that sent Emery and at least three others to the hospital, mostly with minor injuries.

"It wasn't like it was one crazy animal," Nielsen said. But some of the attacks may have been avoided, he thinks, if those victims hadn't done an absolute no-no: moving in on a fawn to pet it.

Now with fawning season soon to peak -- last year's attacks here happened June 7-15 -- Nielsen and other campus officials are using signs, radio spots, e-mails and fliers to put out a word of caution about the deer still roaming the school's Thompson Woods. Later this month, Nielsen even will head a seminar titled "Avoiding Deer-Human Encounters of the Third Kind on Campus."

Silly Salukis.

The effort also includes a two-year study by Nielsen and other researchers to census the local deer population, pinpoint how the animals affect the campus' ecosystem and gauge what locals think of the animals. Nielsen said the study will offer no recommendations on what, if anything, to do with the deer, leaving that often-contentious issue to administrators.

Remember, all you Antlered and Antlerless Americans, you don't have to answer the census question that asks if you are an albino. That's just rascist.