PARKS & OUTDOORS
National Key Deer Refuge
Monroe County · South Florida & the Keys
Eight and a half thousand acres on Big Pine Key and No Name Key, set aside in 1957 for the smallest deer in North America.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
The Key deer is a subspecies of white-tailed deer found nowhere else, about the size of a large dog. By the 1950s hunting and road deaths had brought it down to somewhere between twenty-five and fifty animals; counts in recent years put the herd between eight hundred and a thousand. The refuge holds twenty-four hundred acres of upland forest, five thousand one hundred of wetland and a thousand of marsh, and twenty-one other threatened or endangered plants and animals live in it. The Blue Hole, an old quarry, is the largest natural freshwater pool in the Keys and the easiest place to see the deer, from an observation deck. The Jack C. Watson Wildlife Trail loops through pine rockland and tropical hammock, and the Fred Mannillo trail is short and accessible. Do not feed the deer: fed animals lose their fear of people and die on the highway. The refuge is free and the visitor center is at mile 30.5
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