By Dr. Robert Thorson

Spring is finally here. The time has come to flex our green thumbs, to plant enough flowers, vegetables, ornamental shrubs and trees to keep the resident population of white-tailed deer alive. Just kidding. Perhaps the gardeners should go on strike so the out- of-control deer population will crash in time to save our woodland ecosystem.

I’m not the only one concerned about the wildly multiplying Odocoileus virginianus. I’m not the only one who drives through deer herds at night as if they were potholes; is awakened in the wee hours by the sound of them browsing beneath bedroom windows; has a family riddled by Lyme disease; and who holds his breath while walking past roadkill carrion rotting at curbside. But this past winter, the deer gave me something special: a floating Christmas tree. It’s a bad omen of things to come.

Many years ago, a weed of white pine (Pinus strobus) sprouted on the edge of my back yard. Over the years, it grew steadily to a height of about 12 feet. During the summer, the seedling virtually disappeared, drowned out by the lush green deciduous growth.

But during the winter it emerged — a fluffy patch of evergreen needles, crowned by a triangular top. Then, one foggy morning last winter, I looked through my kitchen window to see a green triangle floating above a grayish-brown background of stems and branches.

The base of the triangle was about five feet off the ground, the identical height at which the ivy gets trimmed off my house by the tribe of deer who browse my yard. They graze boldly, as if it were their personal pasture. (I’ve seen as many as 18 at one time.) Deer normally don’t eat evergreen conifers, which are loaded with resinous, nasty-tasting chemicals that evolved to deter herbivores, and from which we make turpentine and tar.

So, when deer begin to eat white pine, we can be quite sure they’re getting desperate for food. It is under similar circumstances that humans eat their leather boots and belts.

In New England, the top of the food chain has been nearly eliminated by the extinction of large predators. The wild cats and dogs (cougars, wolves, and the like) and human beings (American Indians and pre-suburban, rifle-toting immigrants and their descendants) used to keep the population down because venison has long been a staple for both man and beast. But most wild predators were run off by men because modern suburban society will not tolerate the occasional taking of a child by big, sharp-toothed beasts.

Theoretically, human hunting could make up the shortfall of predators. But unfortunately, the sport is increasingly restricted by fragmentation of the woodland habitat, and has fallen out of fashion in a modern era that is generally fearful of guns and sentimental about how nature really works. Making the problem worse is the fact that New England’s cookie-cutter pattern of housing development has often improved the deer habitat because of the edge effect between house lot and woodland. In addition, people misguidedly feed deer.

It’s no surprise that the deer population rose dramatically as birth rates rose and death rates fell. In the small state of Connecticut alone, there are estimated to be more than 75,000 hungry deer. Of these, more than 3,000 are struck annually by cars and more than 10,000 are killed by hunters. Nevertheless, the population remains oppressive.

The wildlife managers at state agencies and universities are well informed. They know what should be done to stabilize the deer population. The problem is that they don’t have the social support to do what needs to be done, which is to kill more deer or sterilize them.

This, however, is anti-Bambi, the famous animal love story in which evil hunters orphan deer children who struggle against the odds to grow up, fall in love and procreate in sublime happiness.

What’s needed is a new version of Bambi appropriate for the modern era in which deer are pests to be managed. I suggest something like Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” in which flying deer descend on our landscape like locusts. The hero of this story is not a doe-eyed herbivore but a gun-toting omnivore.