Agriculture and predator reduction are the culprits of course. The range of the whitetail deer has expanded along with its population as we cleared more forest and planted fruit orchards and fields of crops. Around my area, caribou were plentiful down to the north shore of Lake Superior until the beginning of this century. Those herds were reduced by many of the same practices employed to get rid of those pesky buffalo herds: head bounties and deals on cheap ammunition for the killing of the herds the native peoples depended on (read Farley Mowat's "People of the Deer").

My own grandfather remembered when the whitetail population exploded in the area his family settled near Iron Bridge, Ontario. As they cleared the land and planted crops, the sparse population of deer filled out its numbers exponentially within a few years. That was cool with the human residents, because the hunting got better and supplemented their diet. Now, with the decline of the family farm in the north, most of those farms have been abandoned and the land has gone back to the wild and we've seen the deer population decrease quite a bit locally. The moose are moving back in and taking over (moose and deer are lousy neighbours; they don't like sharing the same territory and the moose like things on the wilder side).

By the way, another species that has greatly expanded its population and range as the "white man" settled the North American continent is the coyote. My grandfather remembered them coming into the area too; though they were often called "brush wolves" here, he always referred to them as coyotes. Competition with them drove the larger, more shy, timber wolves further into the bush until they are a pretty rare sighting now. The coyotes loved living close to us. They loved eating our garbage, stock, and pets. They also mated with domestic dogs that ran free and produced the aggressive and fearless hybrid coy-dogs that are a real nuisance locally. Many of the dead, torn up deer carcasses we see in the winter around here aren't victims of wolves or even coyotes as I've heard people (who want the bounties put back on the wolves' heads) claim; it's packs of coy-dogs or people's pets that form packs and chase deer in the deep snow. Rover can be a real killer when his instincts take over.