Deer Jumping and Deer Behavior: Introduction
If you’re planning a deer fence or even just considering one, it helps to have background information on deer jumping and related deer behavior. So here it is. It’s not all the information available by any means, but it should help in assessing the nature of your deer situation and determining what kind of fence you’d like to build.
To help browse these pages, everything is presented in short sections. Below see a summary guide to those sections with tag lines. The tag lines tell what’s in the sections, but they don’t tell the whole tale. So if you want to know more, click on the link and read the section.
- Deer Jumping: Why Deer Jump or Don’t: You don’t need a towering deer fence. Most situations call for no more than a 7-foot fence.
- What Deer See: Deer will have trouble seeing the top of your fence (which is good) if you don’t define it with a board or pipe.
- Deer Motives: If deer are not highly motivated to get into the enclosed area, your fence can be relatively modest.
- Deer Pressure: Deer will be harder to fence out if there are lots of them, especially if they have a well-established path through the area to be enclosed.
- Fence Penetration: The deer may take time to get used to the fence — they may run into it accidentally if they don’t see it; or they may bash it repeatedly with their noses if it interdicts their accustomed path — and this may require some maintenance in the early stages.
- Vulnerable Bottoms: How to protect the bottom of your fence.
- The Deer-Small Animal Combo: How small animals gnaw holes in a deer fence that the deer enlarge.
- Deer Intruders: #What to do if a deer gets inside the fence.
- Deer Ticks and Lyme Disease: The effect of a deer fence on deer ticks.
- The Fence Setting: About things like deer pressure and the usefulness of having tree cover along the fence line.
