Islands are often characterized by their inherent isolation, which may lead you to believe that deer would face a tough time dispersing from island to island. In Haida Gwaii, however, it seems deer have aptly demonstrated the proverb “where there’s a will, there’s a way”, because they currently reside on dozens of islands. Management initiatives aiming to remove deer from islands of high ecological and cultural value have therefore been challenged by the deer’s resilience, and many questions have been raised from incomplete eradications. Most importantly, are there islands that could remain deer-free after successful eradications? 

We sought to answer this question, among others, in our recently published study using population genomic data from Sitka black-tailed deer harvested across Haida Gwaii, with an emphasis on deer connectivity within Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, National Marine Conservation Area, and Haida Heritage Site. Our findings confirmed previous anecdotal observations of deer movement among islands. In Juan Perez Sound especially, we identified several pairs of first and second order relatives harvested from different islands using a pairwise kinship analysis. In one example, a deer from Faraday was found to be the brother, father, or son of a deer from the Bischofs. Collectively, these inter-island relationships suggest plenty of deer movement among islands in Juan Perez Sound (Fig. 4).