A growing deer colony has created problems for a Russell neighbourhood, including thousands of dollars in stolen horse feed and a two-car collision that totalled a vehicle.
Sherisse Ziprick of Ziprick Thoroughbreds tells the Sun she is frustrated with a deer colony that returns to her property every winter and steals horse feed, consumes her plants and covers the property in manure. Ziprick said more than $3,000 in damage was recorded last year through stolen food, and the colony causes more issues on her property by pooping, as well as loitering on the nearby highway.
At her family property in Russell, Ziprick breeds racehorses. The sanctuary for horses makes for an attractive winter location for deer, and it’s becoming a bigger issue year by year, she said.
“I just don’t even have an idea left in me of what to do,” said Ziprick. “We’re the Caribbean for the deer, or Phoenix. We’re like the snowbird location. They just want to congregate here because it’s their safe haven.”
Five years ago, Ziprick learned the local deer were behind “a really bad” disappearance of food. She began to apply every year for payouts from the Manitoba Agricultural Services Corporation (MASC), which she learned has a program to cover deer and elk eating stored food.
But the damage at her property surpasses the stolen food, she said. And after the family employed a list of strategies to scare the deer away, to no avail, she said she’s frustrated.
Ziprick took to social media recently, posting a video of the deer and expressed frustration that it seems to be an issue she has no control over. Outside of hunting season, the deer are protected by conservation laws, and she said when the seasons turn, and hunting is legal, the deer disappear.
“Every morning you raise the blinds, and you got (dozens) laying 15 feet from the house. Or you go to do chores in the morning, you pour your grain … walk (away), and 20 deer are coming out of the bush,” Ziprick said.
The family has tried numerous strategies to push the deer away — they’ve set up a scarecrow and sprayed it with perfume, left an inflatable Christmas decoration partially untied and flapping, kept dogs outside and shot guns into the sky.
Yet, nothing has worked.
Ziprick said the growing colony of deer has reached more than 100 since the pandemic. It flows in at opportune times to take a bite of hay and grains, and leaves a season’s worth of manure on the property that requires cleanup in the spring.
“The deer manure on the trail, it was like having dirt paths through our yard. And in the spring, when all of the snow melted, it was just like a swamp. It was walking through puddles and puddles of deer manure.”
Ziprick provided a photo to the Sun, showing deer droppings so dense on the trail that they appeared to be a gravel pathway.
Candace Higgs, a resident of Binscarth, was in a two-car collision involving the deer colony in the winter of 2022. She told the Sun she was on her way to Russell, when right in front of the Ziprick farmyard she was forced to slam on the brakes as deer stood in the middle of the highway.
Higgs said she slid into the ditch, her vehicle undamaged until minutes later when the driver of the next vehicle coming in the same direction couldn’t avoid the deer. The vehicle slammed into a deer, launching it into the side of Higgs’ vehicle, causing enough damage to write it off.
“It was kind of a wild experience,” said Higgs. “I had to step over it to get out of my vehicle.”
Since the accident, Higgs slows down in the area. Her husband still sees the deer every day and she says people know to slow down and keep their eyes peeled.
“I slow right down,” Higgs said. “I know that area. I’m a little bit of freaked out about that area.”
David Van Deynze, chief product officer at MASC, told the Sun that the agency paid roughly $10 million to farmers in the most recent crop year for a program that reimburses wildlife damage. The program, called the Wildlife Damage Compensation Program, pays out to farmers who lose “stored forage” like the Zipricks’ horse feed, and also to farmers who lose crops to wildlife that trample, destroy and eat them during the growing season.
When it comes to stolen feed, Van Deynze said it is most common on land surrounding natural parks — such as the Ziprick’s property near Riding Mountain National Park — and Duck Mountain Provincial Park and the Interlake region.
The snowbird metaphor was right on target, he said.
“We don’t really see much damage happening through the summer months,” Van Deynze said. “That’s the choice of the deer and the elk; they find better food somewhere else in that in that time of year.”
Protecting food from wildlife can include many strategies. The Province of Manitoba wrote a guide in 2022 that includes advice about protecting stored forage — allowing hunters on the land during hunting season, for example, or building eight-foot-high fences around areas that are used for storage and deploying “scare cannons” that activate randomly.
Ziprick said fences aren’t feasible for her 80-acre property, as it’s designed for horses, not strictly for storing food. And other tactics would make life more difficult for her horses, most which go on to race at Assiniboia Downs in Winnipeg.
Frustration was one of the key factors for Ziprick. She said the deer quickly acclimatize themselves to different scare tactics, and return to their calm way of life even after guns are fired into the air. For the family, which takes a financial hit every year, it has become a test of mental fortitude.
“We just kind of laugh at all of the different ways you try to cope with it because you do start to go crazy,” Ziprick said. “I think of it like a … torture test, you know, where it’s the drip, drip, drip. And eventually you go crazy.”
