The bucolic oak-lined entrance to Wormsloe Historic Site belies a grisly wildlife problem at the state historic site.
About once every other month a deer leaping over the site’s wrought iron fence fails to clear the sharp points of the fence pickets. The latest incident was Thursday when site manager Chris Floyd had to remove a dead doe from the fence.
“I had to take a deer off the fence and pull it into the woods,” Floyd said. “I have had to do that many times.”
Isle of Hope Elementary School sits right across Skidaway Road from Wormsloe.
“One morning there was a deer caught on the fence, and it was gruesome,” Principal Julie Gannam wrote in an email. “The deer are everywhere out here. One morning a deer had been hit by a car and was in our bus ramp dead. Our PE teacher moved it before the kids arrived.”
School kids saw deer hung up on the fence. Motorists saw it, too. Wormsloe staff had to remove dead or, worse yet, mortally injured deer that they had to shoot to put out of their misery.
“It’s been going on for a long time,” Floyd said. “It just got to the point where it’s gotta stop.”
So since October, Wormsloe has been altering the fence to make it more Bambi-friendly. Floyd and part-time maintenance worker Caleb Copeland are grinding off the sharp tips of the pickets leaving them only an inch shorter but miles safer.
The fence dates to about 1913, Floyd said. Because Wormsloe is a state heritage preserve, alterations to any of its structures have to be kept to a minimum. The state’s Historic Preservation Division approved the changes.
“We’re trying to proceed cautiously in terms of what we do,” Floyd said. “The first thing is to get the points off. It’s not something that radically alters the aesthetics.”
There were few deer in Georgia when the fence was installed, said David Mixon, coastal region supervisor for game management at the Department of Natural Resources. The state restocked deer with animals brought in from Texas and Michigan in the mid 1900s. While the DNR doesn’t produce county-level deer counts, Mixon said Georgia’s islands typically have more deer.
Deer can easily clear an 8-foot fence, Mixon said, though he’s seen them hung up on even a 4-foot fence.
“Like people, deer do stupid things,” he said.
Wormsloe’s fence is about 6 feet tall, but a ditch parallels much of the road side of the fence making the jump into Wormsloe more of a challenge.
“Deer, a lot of the time, jump only hard enough to get across and they drag their back feet,” Mixon said. “That’s fine as long as it’s a fence they can slide over. But with this fence it’s essentially an arrowhead on top.”
Floyd estimates the fence has about 3,200 pickets and his staff has removed about half those sharp points. It seems to be working. No deer have been found injured on the altered portions of the fence.