The deer are back, and I need a BB gun. You know, an air rifle, the shoot-your-eye-out kind that Ralphie wanted in the “Christmas Story” movie.

Mind you, I haven’t actually seen any deer recently, but the other day one left a signature deposit in my front yard. Also, something has been nibbling on the tops of my tomato plants, and we don’t have 6-foot rabbits around here.  

We used to have lots of deer, but I haven’t actually seen any for a few years. 

They come up from the Raccoon River, which is about a mile south. We live a couple of miles west of downtown in a South of Grand neighborhood that was developed in the early 1900s by people with names like Wallace, Cowles and Meredith. 

Our house is one of the newer ones, built in the early 1950s. It’s on 38th Place, which runs behind Greenwood School. When you get to where we live, it’s barely more than an alley. Actually, it was an alley at one time, built to serve the back entrances of the mansions on 37th Street.

When we arrived in 1976, our house was classic Beaverdale-brick, one story with a brick veneer. We intended to stay a only few years and move to something larger once we started a family. But by the time that happened, interest rates were through the roof and we couldn’t afford anything bigger. 

Because we loved the location, my father loaned us money and we added a second floor.
Our lot is tiny compared with the properties on 37th Street, but those large yards make us feel like we’re living in the middle of a park. 

Our quarter-acre lot backs up to the side yard of a 4-acre property where Bishop Maurice Dingman once lived. In 1979, when Pope John Paul II visited Living History Farms, the Iowa National Guard set up a command center in the bishop’s yard to plan logistics of the papal visit. It was great entertainment for my wife, who was home with our infant daughter.

Sometime in the 1990s, long after the Catholic Church sold the bishop’s home, deer began to frequent the neighborhood. The first time I saw one, it had just snowed and a doe was nuzzling seed out of a bird feeder less than 10 feet from our back door.

The deer were cute for a while, until they began destroying the yard. They ate hostas and killed small trees by stripping the bark with their teeth. One spring, after the snow melted, my backyard looked like a feedlot with all the hoof prints and ground-in manure. 

“Rats with antlers” is the phrase several friends used to describe them.

One Saturday, I counted more than a dozen walking through the side yard where the bishop once lived.  

It got so bad that the city eventually let hunters thin the herd.

The people who bought the bishop’s home put up a chain-link fence to keep the deer out. The fence caused a stir, because it is totally inappropriate for the neighborhood.

We quit complaining, though, when we realized the fence was actually keeping the deer in their yard and out of ours. 

Our home backs up to a small ravine, and the new owners built the fence on the lot line, which is on our side of the ravine. 

That means our property is on the high side of the fence. Deer can easily jump out of our yard, and have done so. It’s a much higher jump from the other side, and I’ve never seen a deer do that. 

For years, that fence helped keep deer out of our yard. 

But now they’re back, and I need to get a BB gun so I can shoot trespassers in the butt.