Another outbreak looming?

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Victoria Lewellyn shows where a black-tailed doe lay on the carpet of the family’s exercise room.Jamie Lusch

October 12, 2008

By Mark Freeman

Mail Tribune

JACKSONVILLE — When VictoriaLewellyn stepped from her Cady Road porch into her family's exercise room Monday, she found herself knees-to-nose with one of the city's signature backyard fauna.

A black-tailed doe lay on her carpet, knees folded under her torso and staring blankly at Lewellyn not four feet away. Its rump had a mangy twinge to it. It urinated on the carpet and wouldn't budge after an hour of shoo-ing it toward two open doors.

"Usually, you can go 'shoo-shoo' and they run off," Lewellyn said. "But she was dazed, unaware.

"It was the most bizarre thing I've ever seen."

Biologists are bracing for more bizarre deer stories as they begin investigating what could be the start of another disease outbreak among blacktails living the usually luxurious life here, where their presence is tolerated and their diets often are supplemented.

Seemingly healthy deer have been discovered paralyzed and eventually dead from what field necropsies show to be internal parasites and diarrhea.

Residents report fawns foaming at the mouth and deer, such as the doe at the Lewellyn home, have been seen stumbling and falling as they roam unimpeded through town.

In at least one case along Hillside Drive on the same day as the Lewellyns' ordeal, a paralyzed and dying doe was found near a pile of corn left outside for wildlife, said Steve Niemela, a wildlife biologist with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, who is investigating the case.

Jacksonville has a history of being home to unnaturally high densities of "city deer" ripe for epidemics because piles of human-provided food become disease factories unwittingly created by people who believe they are helping the animals.

The practice is not illegal in Oregon. But the unnatural food can be tough to digest and lead to scouring, or create circumstances where seemingly dormant viruses could explode.

"We don't know exactly what it is," Niemela said. "In any case, feeding the deer will exacerbate it.

"The main action people can do is to stop feeding the deer."

One possibility for the deaths could be a return of the adenovirus, which ripped through Jackson County's urban deer herds for much of the early 2000s before nearly disappearing here in recent years, Niemela said.

Another possibility could be a new virus that easily spreads as blacktails unnaturally share food and water sources, he added.

Anther disease known to infect the region's deer is Deer Hair-Loss Syndrome.

Niemela took blood samples from two of the dead deer and discovered less serum in their blood than normal, he said.

Samples have been shipped to a state wildlife lab for analysis.

The Lewellyns are no newbies when it comes to sharing their nine acres with deer, which they never feed, though others along Cady Road do, she said.

The animals regularly walk through the yard, nibble on potted plants and will walk up stairs to peek through their sliding-glass door.

Lewellyn recalled seeing this ruffled-looking doe in her yard and thinking, "she's not OK," said Lewellyn, who has lived there seven years.

The doe clearly was worse in her house. Her 15-year-old son, Alex, gave the deer a once-over but found no injuries or blood.

After more than an hour of cajoling, the deer wouldn't budge. So they backed off, hoping the doe would leave on its own.

"I felt terrible," Lewellyn said. "I just wanted her to get out, relax, go die or something."

Almost two hours later, she returned to see the blacktail wobble and fall as it slunk out of the house.

It collapsed again on the porch and on a short retaining wall before it disappeared into the woods.

"I haven't seen it since," she said.

Other than wanting to quell any outbreak before it becomes a local epidemic, biologists don't want to see any outbreak find its way into Southern Oregon's migratory herds, which make up the bulk of the population, Niemela said.

"We don't want to see any deer dying from disease that can be prevented," he said. "We really need people to stop feeding the deer, especially if there's a disease that can be distributed through feeding stations."

Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail mfreeman@mailtribune.com.

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