If you spend any time in that maritime forest and the marsh edges, you're going to see deer — and some of them aren't what they seem. Some of them came here all the way from the other side of the planet, and hardly anybody planned for what happened next.
Back in the nineteen-twenties, somebody had the notion to release a few sika onto Assateague. Now, we call them sika deer, but they're really a small elk, native to Japan and the mainland of Asia — dark, compact, spotted, with a bugling call that sounds nothing like a whitetail. A handful of them turned loose on this island, and it turned out to be just about perfect elk country: marsh and forest, mild winters, no natural predators to speak of. So they did what animals do in paradise. They multiplied.
Today there are thousands of these little Asian elk roaming the Maryland end of Assateague, sharing the island with the native white-tailed deer and the wild horses — three big grazers on one strip of sand, an accidental menagerie. The sika stick to the marsh and the thick cover, so they're shyer than the horses; catch one at dawn or dusk and you're looking at a creature whose great-great-grandparents crossed an ocean in a crate.
It's a funny thing about Assateague. Half the famous residents aren't originally from here at all — horses from the mainland, elk from Asia — cut loose, forgotten, and left to turn wild. This island has a way of taking in strays and making them legends.
And if all this wildlife has you itching to get out and walk a bit, keep an eye to your right along here for the Life of the Marsh trailhead — a short, flat boardwalk loop out over the bay-side salt marsh. It looks like plain grass and mud, but that marsh is one of the richest, most alive places on the whole island: a nursery where crabs and shrimp and young fish grow up hidden in the cordgrass.
Photo: Jakub Hałun · CC BY 4.0
