It works on deer and teenage girls ~ July 5, 2001

David Heiller

So far, so good with the Great Deer Experiment. It started last year, when some deer discovered our garden. We live in the country, and have always raised a big garden. For some reason the deer never bothered it.

Lots of garden for the enemy.

Until last summer. Then 19 years of pent-up hunger was unleashed. They ate corn, peas, beans, vine crops, and hollyhocks. They were particularly fond of the delphiniums. They would come in the middle of the night, when the dog was in the house. Many times I would step out of the house at about 6 a.m. and chase them from the garden.

It was sickening to watch the garden disappear day-by-day. I figured something had to be done for this year. Then as usual I forgot about it.

This spring, as I labored with love on the new garden, I wondered how to keep those pesky deer from repeating their new-found habits. (Pesky is not the word I normally use in describing the deer, but it works for this column.) Then about three weeks ago I saw deer hoof prints in the garden. They had found the peas and delphiniums.

So with a new sense of urgency, I called some friends, Ken and Pat Larson of Sturgeon Lake, who have a very good electric fence. Pat told me they have a wire six inches off the ground, then every six inches after that to three feet, then every foot to six feet. Now that’s a fence! All they are lacking are some German shepherds and a guard tower with a 50 millimeter machine gun.

Then I asked Rich and Bev Mensing, who have a huge garden at their home near Giese. Rich said they just plant a big garden and give half of it to the deer. Not a bad idea either.

My solution was somewhere in between: I bought a motion detector that screws into a light fixture. Into this I screwed in another fixture that has a receptacle in it. I plugged a radio into it, and screwed in a light bulb. So when the motion detector is tripped, the light comes on and the radio starts playing.

I happened to have an old radio/tape player (one of those old boom-boxes) in the garage. The volume control is broken at the maximum setting, so it is worthless for most uses, but perfect for this. To top it off, the tape deck had a tape in it of “Mollie’s Most,” filled with music that my daughter, Mollie, had made several years ago. The songs are teenage tunes by groups like Hanson and N-Sync.

The pesky ones: The enemy!

When the motion detector is tripped, a light comes, on along with 110 decibels of teenage yodeling.
Knock on wood, but it works! No deer have been in the garden since its introduction. It even scared Mollie and a friend who accidentally tripped it one evening. Mollie said it “freaked her out.” Her musical tastes have changed, thankfully.

If Hanson doesn’t scare the deer away, I will move to sound effects of barking dogs and shot gun blasts.

If that fails I will go to the ultimate weapon, the Atom Bomb of music: I will record some banjo music for the tape player. When the deer trip that, they will know they have met their match. After all, deer know that it takes two banjo players to feast on venison: one to eat and the other to watch for traffic.