Yes, deer can swim, and some are making the trek between islands in Beaufort County
Leah Watt looked out over the bright sun setting over Skull Inlet.
It was mid-September and the final night of her family’s annual beach vacation to Fripp Island. As photographers do, Watt found herself looking through her lens, not knowing that in pursuit of capturing something beautiful, she would also capture something completely unexpected.
Off Wardle’s Landing Pier, Watt saw something dark in the otherwise sunlit water. At first, it was stationary. Then, it started moving closer to the beach from Pritchards Island across the inlet.
It wasn’t a tree limb. It wasn’t a dog. It was a lone deer.
Watt quickly replaced the lens on her camera to zoom in on the buck, slowly but surely making his way to the waters’ edge. His head was barely above water, and a small flock of birds followed closely as if to make sure he arrived on land safely. People gathered on the lookout and cheered on the deer, only for him to run off as soon as he reached land.
The experience left her “mind blown,” she said. Growing up in the northern part of the state and recently moving to Beaufort, she had seen plenty of deer in her life. She had even taken plenty of photos of the skittish but gentle animals before, including a lone buck that kept coming around their vacation rental each night.
But she had never captured them doggy-paddling through a deep body of water.
‘The traveling fever’
Deer have been known to swim in waterways throughout Beaufort County for many years. They’ve been seen making the more than one mile trek from Sea Pines to Daufuskie Island and even coming ashore on Hilton Head Island beaches.
Even though deer are naturally strong swimmers, this behavior is not overly common, according to Charles Ruth, a wildlife biologist with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources who serves as the Big Game Program Coordinator.
Deer, for the most part, are homebodies, with a “home range” or area where they live, eat and mate, of between 500 and 1,000 acres, he said.
But in breeding season, deer behavior and movement can change, said Ruth. Some take excursions, which means they leave and come back to the home range. Others disperse, which means they leave their home and do not come back.
Around 50% of bucks, mostly those who are just over a year old, will leave their home range, especially during the breeding season. But moving across bodies of water to do so is not entirely common procedure, Ruth said.
In the late 1990s, a study was conducted in Sea Pines, when the community was in the process of forming a deer management protocol. At the time, Ruth was DNR’s Deer Specialist. The researchers caught around 30 deer and put radio transmitters on them to track their movement. Lo and behold, Ruth said, one of those deer, that he described as an “outlier,” took to water and swam to Daufuskie Island.
There is no definitive, single reason why deer do this. It could be the result of males searching for mates, males leaving their mother’s territory to prevent inbreeding or a combination of factors, Ruth said.
Unlike people and much like a hunting dog, Ruth said, deer don’t necessarily think about what will happen before they jump into water. They are not considering the distance or difficulty of the swim. In some ways, they are fearless. According to the National Deer Association, deer have been documented to swim several miles at a time.
“When they get the traveling fever, they can do it,” Ruth said.
