Because they are plentiful and adept at living along the edges of suburban office complexes and subdivisions, deer are the most conspicuous and annoying example of the clash between wildlife and sprawling development.

The state's deer population has stayed near the 1 million mark since 1993, largely because of increasingly liberal bag limits that allow hunters to kill does.

But the number of North Carolina hunters has steadily declined -- from 380,851 in 1994 to 304,833 this year -- while the number of people, vehicles and miles driven has steadily increased.

"If you have more vehicles out there and they're driving more miles, they're going to hit more of everything," said Evin Stanford, the state's deer biologist.

The pressure of suburban sprawl has also been relentless, chewing up 1.5 million acres of farm or forest in the past 20 years, much of that land in the Piedmont, said Scott Osborne, surveys and research coordinator for the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission. If deer weren't so flexible, such development would have displaced about 84,000 animals.

However, deer are the ultimate "edge" species and seem to thrive in suburbia, where they are seen by an increasing number of homeowners as shrubbery-chomping pests.

As a result, wildlife biologists now talk about the yawning difference between the biological capacity of a piece of land -- typically, 30 deer per acre -- and its social capacity -- how many deer people are willing to tolerate.

But here's where wildlife managers get hogtied, Osborne said. The same homeowners who want deer removed from their property don't want to see them hunted. As a result, more and more communities are banning hunts inside their once-rural borders.

"The last thing somebody who moves into those subdivisions wants to see is a bunch of hunters running around trying to shoot deer," he said. "A lot of the traditional ways of managing our deer population through hunting are either illegal, unsafe or socially unacceptable."

Suburbanites who still want to get rid of deer munching their gardens prefer more humane methods. But trapping and removing deer might actually spur the biological imperative to reproduce, said Richard Lancia, a wildlife sciences professor at N.C. State University.

"Lay people don't appreciate the complexity of the problems involved and don't understand the dynamics of a deer population," he said. "You think if you get rid of Bambi, you get rid of Bambi's kids, and that's not necessarily the case."

Deer aren't the only focus of a suburbanite's ire, said Stanford, who works for the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission. Travel to Asheville, he says, where wildlife managers field as many as 30 calls a week about black bears rummaging in somebody's garbage can.

"When it really comes down to it," he said, "people and wildlife don't get along, whether it's white-tailed deer getting hit by cars, squirrels in the attic or bears getting into homes near Asheville."