World Deer is owned and written by Ian, and if you’ve read almost anything on this site, you’ve read his work — articles here carry the byline Ian from World Deer. This page covers where the site came from, how its content gets made, and what it has grown into.
How World Deer Started
The site launched in 2005 with a simple mission: share and expand knowledge about the world’s wild deer, from the red deer of European woodlands to the whitetails of North America. More than two decades later that mission hasn’t changed, but the site around it has grown enormously — from a collection of species profiles into one of the most comprehensive deer references on the web, read primarily in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia. Along the way, our work has been referenced by outlets and institutions including PBS.org, NJ.com, iNaturalist, the University of Michigan’s AnimalDiversity.org, and the BBC.
How We Approach the Subject
World Deer’s content is written from the field as much as from the literature. The hunting guides are built for people who actually hunt — practical, season-aware, and honest about what works — and the garden content is written for people dealing with real deer pressure, not hypothetical deer. At the same time, the biology and species content holds itself to what published research actually supports: numbers trace to sources, unsettled science is presented as unsettled, regulations defer to state wildlife agencies, and pet-health topics stay consistent with mainstream veterinary consensus. The full detail is in our editorial standards.
What the Site Covers Today
Deer remain the flagship — the deer species library, deer behavior and biology, deer hunting with guides for all 50 states, bowhunting, public-land hunting, venison, and the deer-proof garden guide. But deer don’t live in isolation, and the site has followed them outward: wolves and other predators, bats and backyard wildlife, rabbits, and dogs — the animals that share a deer’s world, and ours.
Why the Site Exists
The mission behind World Deer is the one it launched with: the belief that knowledge drives better outcomes for wildlife. People protect what they understand — and that’s as true of a hunter learning why season structures exist as it is of a gardener learning to coexist with the herd that raids the hostas, or a student writing a report on caribou migration. So the site is built for all of them at once. The species profiles are detailed enough for researchers, the how-to content is practical enough for a Saturday morning in a treestand, and everything in between is written to be read by a curious person with no background in wildlife biology at all.
That mission is also why the site keeps growing rather than sitting still. Content here is reviewed and expanded on an ongoing basis: older articles get revisited as research moves and regulations change, new questions from readers turn into new articles, and whole new hubs get built when a subject earns sustained depth rather than a one-off post. World Deer also collaborates with organizations and researchers to keep its content in line with the current state of deer research and conservation, and errors that readers report get fixed in the article itself, promptly.
Get in Touch
Questions, corrections, and story ideas are always welcome through the contact page — corrections especially, since fixing errors fast is part of how this site earns trust. And if you’re a writer with genuine wildlife or hunting knowledge, we occasionally take contributions: see write for us for how that works.