At the turn of the 20th century, there were only 300,000 white tail deer in North America, down from an estimated 30 million on the eve of colonization. Decades of hunting, habitat destruction and particularly hunting young deer dropped the population to a dangerously low level. The species’ continued survival is only thanks to the protection of the deer in the early 1900s and the ensuing end of commercial deer hunting; today there are 30 million to 35 million white tail deer in North America, basically at pre-colonization level.
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