The power of Pearl: White-tailed deer’s bond with family endures

By Steve Young, for Pigeon605

It was dark that February evening, almost pitch-black outside, when Jeff Kirstein called out into the night.

“Pearl,” he barked as he squinted through the darkness. There were deer out there. A young man had spotted them earlier milling about in the trees surrounding an old, abandoned farmstead just northeast of Lennox. Had to be at least a hundred of them, the fellow insisted.

But only one deer could bring Jeff to the countryside this late at night. A white-tailed doe that had come into the orbit of he and his wife, Nancy, 20 months earlier as an orphaned fawn. A speckled little creature they had named Pearl after one of their favorite authors, Pearl S. Buck.

By the rules of wildlife management, their connection with Pearl never should have happened. The tiny deer should have been left to the wild, dropped off at a rehabilitation center or, at worst, euthanized. But the Kirsteins didn’t have it in them to put down this precocious animal-child and would not turn her away after she had been brought to them. Instead, they fed her, gave her water, loved her and shared her with thousands of friends and folks across the southeast corner of South Dakota.

As a result, Pearl imprinted on Jeff Kirstein; there seems no question of that. She came and went constantly to their Good Earth Farm south of Lennox, stopping by for snacks, getting drinks, posing for selfies with visitors and wandering freely across their property and even into their house.

That said, Pearl was never theirs to own, the couple insist. They never penned her, never leashed her and always believed that one day, she would find her way safely back into the wild, among her own kind, again.

And eventually, she did just that.

Still, on those occasions when too much time passed between visits, Jeff and Nancy did worry. Everyone who knew Pearl – and we’re talking thousands of people – worried as they kept a lookout for her. For deer face plenty of dangers in this world: predators, hunters, vehicles barreling down nearby blacktop and gravel roads. And as he stood on the gravel road that February night, Jeff hadn’t seen Pearl for a long time.

***

A dozen years ago, the Kirsteins bought this place 4-plus miles south of Lennox – 30 acres with a collection of homestead buildings – that they ended up calling The Good Earth Farm after a beloved book by Pearl Buck called “The Good Earth.”

They raise organic vegetables at the farm and offer shares in that venture. They’ve restored the barn and turned it into a venue for weddings and other events. And they’ve become an outpost for an interesting menagerie of animals that no one else wanted, including two pigs, two donkeys, a pony, a crooked-horn miniature bull and an assortment of geese, ducks, cats and more.

“I wouldn’t call us a refuge,” Nancy says. “People just give us animals. We have the space for it, and that’s great. But to be honest, the idea of this place as an animal sanctuary is still evolving.”

The story of The Good Earth Farm was beautifully told in a June 2021 Pigeon605 piece. Readers learned in that story about T-Bone the miniature bull, Rex the pony, pigs Weird Harold and Charlie. And, of course, they were introduced to Pearl.

A friend of a friend had found the fawn being led at the end of a string down a sidewalk by a group of kids. A bit of investigation revealed the mother had been killed and, after a series of conversations about what to do with her, the orphan ultimately was dropped off at The Good Earth Farm.

***

On the day Pearl showed up at their place, Jeff and Nancy Kirstein needed no explanations on the do’s and don’ts of wildlife ownership. They understood the fawn was wild. They knew deer are not pets.

But they also believe what happened in those early days wasn’t wrong. They had not come upon Pearl in the wild. They had not been given the option to simply walk away from her. The tiny creature had come to them from someone who was worried about her, and they understood that worry.

So, as they had with other animals at The Good Earth Farm, the Kirsteins took the fawn in, accepted what may come and envisioned a day when Pearl would in fact find her way back to her own kind.

In the meantime, a magical tale of human-animal bonding unfolded.

When Pearl was thirsty, they gave her water. When she was hungry, they fed her. She liked tomatoes and Wheat Thins, granola bars and fruit. She nibbled on popsicles and munched on Doritos. As her tastes became more sophisticated, she moved on to Honey Bunches of Oats.

Pearl hung around the farm a lot initially, standing outside the door to see if anyone was home, wandering into the kitchen, nuzzling with Jeff and Nancy on the porch or bounding along the mile-and-a-half path that stretches through their property.

On evenings when music was playing at an event in the refurbished barn or a campfire was blazing outside, she might move among tables of guests, stopping for photos or even joining the band. If the Kirsteins weren’t home, it wasn’t beyond Pearl to visit the neighbors nearby.

School classes even followed her exploits on Facebook.

“There’s something about opening your door in the morning and having a deer standing in your yard that doesn’t just bolt,” Jeff says. “That’s special. And we’re really happy that so many other people, thousands of people, have gotten to experience that over the years.”

***

At one point, as Pearl grew older and began spending more time with what Nancy calls “her own people” in the wild, the Kirsteins worried about her safety and put a GPS tracking collar on her.

Female deer who can find adequate food and shelter typically don’t wander much beyond a home area of 5 to 6 miles. So while Jeff and Nancy suspected Pearl wasn’t too far away, they worried about her, worried about her safety and put the collar on to track her travels.

Eventually, Game, Fish and Parks found out about the GPS device. Someone had complained after seeing the collar. So GFP sent staff out to The Good Earth Farm and advised the Kirsteins to remove it.

“It was kind of a difficult situation for everybody because they don’t want to have to put the animal down. That would be terrible for them, and terrible for us too,” Nancy says. Deer in South Dakota belong to the state, it was explained to them. A collar might suggest ownership, and wild deer are not to be owned.

“So ‘take the collar off’ is basically what they said,” Nancy says. “And we understood it.”

So it was that a year ago, as the couple got used to Pearl spending more time in the wild and as the hunting season wound down, they decided they could get away for a while and headed to Mexico for a month or so. Even then, from their rental home overlooking the Pacific Ocean, they could access a camera set up at their place back home and keep tabs on Pearl’s comings and goings.

Because there are other animals on the farm, folks would stop by daily as well to check on them and would report back to the Kirsteins when they saw Pearl staring through a door window or wandering the grounds.

“And then one day,” Jeff says, “she just stopped coming. Like, there’s no more Pearl. Not a single sign of her. It was about five days before we were going to head back. It was very unusual; she was just always there.”

So they packed up the car and hustled straight back, nonstop, from Mexico.

***

With snow on the ground and cold bearing down on the countryside, the Kirsteins started searching.

It was last February. The couple had been driving the gravel roads, and now Jeff was walking the back of their property, maybe a half-mile from the house, when he found a deer carcass near a bridge. It had been decapitated; its legs cut off.

A neighbor would later message Nancy and tell her that they had seen someone down there with a spotlight one night with a gray Dodge pickup.

“So we’re like, oh, shoot,” Jeff says. “Our minds go, ‘She’s gone.’ I put out a reward of $2,500 for information.”

When Game, Fish and Parks was alerted to the situation, officers came out and concluded that the carcass was not Pearl’s. It had been there too long based on the last time Pearl had been seen, they told Jeff and Nancy.

Though they weren’t necessarily convinced the GFP staff was right, the Kirsteins kept searching. Neighbors were lining up to help as well. People on the lookout were coming across countless deer carcasses in ditches around Lennox, adding to the anxiety. It seemed hunters or poachers were taking the meat but opting not to pay the money to properly dispose of them as winter turned to a warming spring and were just throwing the carcasses away.

Was Pearl among them?

As word of the doe’s disappearance spread, people who had learned of her through Facebook postings or visits to The Good Earth Farm reached out to Jeff and Nancy seeking updates or wanting to help. Several local radio stations even carried the story of the missing deer.

Where was this little doe? It was amazing to Jeff and Nancy how much Pearl had become such a presence in the lives of so many, such a force of nature who touched so many by simply running up to them with her white tail wagging. The thought she might be gone now seemingly took the air out of their lives.

“To have a wild animal come up to you like that, your brain says, ‘This doesn’t compute. It shouldn’t be happening,’” Jeff says. “But it happens a bunch with Pearl. So to come back to this place and have that life force gone, it changed the energy of this place.”

***

To Jeff and Nancy Kirstein, the unmistakable magic of Pearl lies in the connection between what’s wild and what has been tamed. Pearl will always be wild. And as time passed, as she spent more time out on her own, that wildness became more obvious. She had birthed a fawn, a doe. She was increasingly less inclined to nuzzle those closest to her. Her head seemed more and more to always be on a swivel.

Yet she always came back to the farm, whether it was every couple of days or longer. She returned for the snacks she loved. She seemed content to be part of the Kirsteins’ world as well as the wild.

Now, well, Jeff and Nancy didn’t want to believe she was really gone. So they clung to one more glimmer of hope on that late February evening. The young man who had called them was convinced she had to be among the hundred animals milling about the abandoned farm. He had seen a deer on his way to work in Lennox that morning. She didn’t run away as most deer do. She simply stood there.

Pearl had to be out there with the others, he insisted.

It seemed worth a shot. So Jeff came out into the cold and darkness, and stood on a gravel road and called out Pearl’s name.

What happened next was mystical, almost supernatural.

Suddenly, the young man peering through the darkness began muttering expletives. “Holy crap,” he said, or something that like, repeating it again and again.

“What?” Jeff anxiously asked him, for he couldn’t see a thing.

“I can’t believe it,” the fellow kept repeating. “There’s a deer running at us. Holy crap. I can’t believe it.”

Moments later, Pearl ran right up to them and started licking Jeff’s ear.

***

Pearl followed Jeff home that night. And over the past nine months, she has been a frequent visitor at The Good Earth Farm, though the days in between visits seem to have grown longer.

She’s not as affectionate anymore. That’s not unexpected. The imprinting of a fawn with a human most certainly will fade over time as it typically does in the deer world after a number of years.

And certainly, the dangers for Pearl remain. She still could get hit by a car. She may be attacked by a coyote or some other predator. And she could always end up in a hunter’s scope.

“We understand her situation,” Jeff says. “She could get hit by a car. She could get shot during hunting season. That is all legal and legit.”

What they have struggled with is the idea that someday she might fall victim to something illegal, like a poacher. When they’ve seen deer blinds go up in the area, they will inquire about them. Neighbors have assured them that they will not hunt Pearl, and that they will keep an eye on her. With a lot of new housing going up in the area, the hunting pressure has seemed to diminish.

In the days after Thanksgiving this year, Pearl turned up constantly at the farm, hanging out on the porch several times a day. The Kirsteins say they will welcome her as often as she wants to come, and as long as nature makes that possible.

“She’s the missing link,” Jeff has said. “She can go away, go anywhere she wants, but she wants to come back and see us. That to me is the magic part of all this.”

Whitetail deer becomes part of family at Good Earth Farm