Eagle River Michigan Man's Backyard Completely Filled With Deer

Growing up near a wooded area, my dad would buy a massive bag of carrots and sugar beets for the deer that frequented our backyard. Every once in a while we'd be lucky if 4 or 5 showed up to snack on the veggies left out for them. But never in a million years would we imagine getting the amount that this one Yooper had in Eagle River, Michigan on Valentine's Day. From what I can make out, there are roughly 45 deer just hanging out in his backyard.

The video was shot and posted on E Neil Harry's Facebook and already is blowing up, as people are astounded at the amount of deer that assembled in one place:

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One person took the video as a chance to kid about how a similar experience would have helped during her studies:

I had a wildlife management class at NMU where we had to go out to a deer yard and count their piles of scat per square yard and try and estimate a population count. Would have been a lot easier to just snowmobile up like this.

Deer Population in Michigan

This sighting may not seem rare considering it is in the Upper peninsula, but Chad Stewart, a deer, elk and moose management specialist with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources says the majority of deer are in the Lower peninsula, making this video even more special:

Stewart estimated there may be as many as two million deer in Michigan today, up from closer to 1.7 million a decade ago, and closer to 1 million in the 1940s — a number that species managers of the time already saw as problematically large. It’s a different story in the Upper Peninsula, where recent harsh winters have made deer scarcer in some regions.