Though in life Rube Goldberg was known to the world as a cartoonist, he was first an engineer. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1904 and took a job in San Francisco where he worked on the city’s sewer systems. But he didn’t last long. A naturally talented artist, Goldberg became a sports cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle earning $8 per week.

He moved to New York in 1907; by 1915, his cartoons were nationally syndicated. This was an era in which a syndicated cartoonist could make a healthy living: according to a short profile published by The New York Times in 1963, Goldberg was earning a salary upwards of $50,000 by 1916 — over $1 million by today’s standards.

Over the course of his decades-long career, Goldberg drew cartoons that were variously political and frivolous. He penned three nationally syndicated, weekly comic strips —”Boob McNutt,” “Mike and Ike: They Look Alike,” and “Lala Palooza” — and wrote a single-frame cartoon called “Foolish Questions.” At the peak of his career, he wrote three editorial page cartoons every week, which appeared in 43 newspapers across the country.

Goldberg’s work made him famous: he was named the first president of the National Cartoonists Society in 1946; in 1948, he won the Pulitzer Prize for a political cartoon satirizing nuclear power. (The conservative Goldberg was invited to the White House by Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon.) Goldberg “has won as many trophies as even his most prolific trophy-inventing machine might devise,” reads a short Times profile on the occasion of his 80th birthday. “He takes them seriously but not too seriously, like nearly everything else in life.”

Goldberg’s Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoon

But Goldberg’s engineering studies were not entirely wasted — no cartoons left as indelible an impact on popular culture as his mechanical chain-reaction illustrations. Goldberg drew his cockamamie inventions intermittently from the beginning of his career — he drew the first, “Automatic Weight Reducing Machine,” in 1914, and in 1921 Marcel Duchamp published some of Goldberg’s designs in New York Dada. But the majority of these cartoons come from a bi-weekly series he drew for the magazine Collier’s Weekly from 1929 to 1931 called “The Inventions of Professor Lucifer G. Butts.” Professor Butts (the “G” stood for “Gorgonzola”) was a parody of a Berkeley engineering professor who had once asked his students to design a machine that could weigh the world. Goldberg, one of those students, found this to be a preposterous task.

The machines were symbols of “man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results.”

The surrealism of Goldberg’s cartoon inventions — in one, someone has sent Professor Butts a mail bomb, which he uses to build a device that will blow up inflatable armbands to go swimming — is meant to entertain, but it also reveals a dark skepticism of the era in which they were made. The machines were symbols, Goldberg wrote, of “man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results.” The early 20th century was a time of great technological upheaval — inventions of unprecedented complexity were introduced to the world as novelties and quickly became ubiquitous.

Charlie Chaplin and the Billows Feeding Machine from 1936’s Modern Times

It was also the era of increasing automation, and increasing concern about automation, exemplified in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 masterpiece Modern Times. One of the film’s dystopian curiosities, the Billows Feeding Machine, invented by Mr. J. Widdecombe Billows, has a distinctly Rube Goldbergian quality to it — this is likely no coincidence, as Goldberg and Chaplin were friends. “The Billows Feeding Machine will eliminate the lunch hour, increase your production, and decrease your overhead,” the film’s narrator announces. “Don’t stop for lunch: be ahead of your competitor.” A factory worker is strapped into the feeding machine by his neck; the device malfunctions spectacularly.

Many of Professor Butts’ inventions blurred the distinction between man and machine, incorporating people and animals into the mechanical process. In “Idea for Blowing Up Water Wings,” a giant razor is used to cut a dog’s hair, who then catches a cold and sneezes, which fills up the inflatable arm bands. “If razor kills spaniel, then you will sink and never know that Professor Butts has failed for the first time in his life,” the caption reads. “Automatic Suicide Device for Unlucky Stock Speculators” includes a toy glider hitting the head of a “dwarf,” who triggers the next step by jumping up and down in pain. “The things may look impossibly foolish, but at the same time they are quite logical,” Goldberg said of his inventions. “For instance, when I have a goat crying in one of my cartoons, I have to give a satisfactory reason for having him cry. So I have someone take a tin can away from him.”

The machines built in Rube Goldberg’s name today (he never actually built one himself) are largely whimsical things — any social commentary subsumed by the “gee whiz” impulse toward engineering for engineering’s sake (nowhere is this better displayed than in the gate-opening machine from 1985’s The Goonies). They seem to have taken on a new life, too, in our internet era: five years ago, the band OK Go released a music video featuring a Rube Goldberg machine that has since been viewed nearly 50 million times; Joseph Herscher, an artist from New Zealand, builds Rube Goldberg machines and posts them to YouTube where they’re viewed millions of times; and a video of a machine built within the game Minecraft has been viewed a little over 2 million times. “I think the internet gave Rube a whole new meaning, a whole new life,” Jennifer George, Rube Goldberg’s granddaughter told me. “Any Rube Goldberg machine worth its salt goes viral.”

To qualify for the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest college nationals, teams must first compete at regionals. The rules are simple: machines must be composed of a minimum of 20 steps and a maximum of 75, and they must complete their run in under two minutes. Teams are permitted to use no more than two air compressors, power cords, or water hoses. Elements of the machine may not travel beyond its 10-square-foot footprint, and machines can be no more than 8 feet tall.

The earliest iteration of the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest took place for a few years in the early ’50s between two engineering fraternities at Purdue. The trophy from that competition ended up with the Theta Tau Fraternity until 1983, when a pledge named Lonnie Oxley, who was tasked with dusting it off, was inspired to bring the event back to life. Reviving the competition took some work: “The most critical thing,” Oxley told me over the phone, “was getting a second machine. Wouldn’t be much of a contest with just one machine.” The second year, the competition was sponsored by Pepsi — the task was to pour the soda into a cup. One of the teams, Oxley said, built a sign advertising Pepsi into their machine. (This year, Purdue’s regional competition was sponsored by General Motors and Nucor Steel.)

In the late ’80s, Rube Goldberg’s son, George W. George, created a company called Rube Goldberg, Inc. to manage registrations, trademarks, and licenses. Eight years ago, Jennifer George, Rube’s granddaughter, took over the family business and decided to grow it from a hodgepodge of events and trinkets to a full-fledged enterprise. “My father, he was happy to just give the plant enough water so it didn’t die,” Jennifer told me. “I am intent on fertilizing this plant, and putting it in the sun, and making sure it’s watered every day. Somebody asked me last year, ‘Where do you see yourself in 10 years?’ I said, ‘Waiting in line for the Rube Goldberg roller coaster.’ That’s how I see this thing. I think it’s giant.”

The relevance and appeal of Rube Goldberg machines today, George told me, is in what it reveals about how technology — and the way we live with it — has changed. “This is a very complex machine,” George said, holding up her phone. “But is it a Rube Goldberg? No.” She added, “When your phone doesn’t work…can you fix it?” Rube Goldberg machines remind us of a time when we could see how the machines around us worked: you could pop the hood of your car and — theoretically at least — fix it, or learn how to. Now, you pop the hood of your car and there’s a computer inside.

A week before the nationals, I visited Penn State to meet the Society of Engineering Scientists team and see their machine. The Penn State SES team has previously participated in regional Rube Goldberg Machine Contests, but they’ve never qualified for nationals before. Last year, the team didn’t compete at all; this year’s team is full of novices, and they’re scrappy. They picked up tricks from watching videos of Purdue machines from years past, and they built their machine in an empty office of a labyrinthine engineering building.

“An engineer is supposed to look at a complicated problem and come up with a simple solution,” said freshman Rebecca Terosky, the team’s wide-eyed co-captain. “This,” she said, referring to Rube Goldberg machines, “is the opposite of what an engineer is supposed to do. You’re using everyday materials, making it whimsical. You don’t feel like you’re working, you feel like you’re playing with toys.”

On my visit, the team was building a key component that involved a ball falling off a table onto a button, which triggered a wind-up car. The members of SES were relaxed — someone would hammer in a step and then stop to talk about a chemistry quiz or gossip about a professor with a massage chair in his office before debating the best way to cut foam.

The team has a sponsor, however, who is more serious-minded about the competition — an engineer and Penn State alumnus named Glen Chatfield. Chatfield offered the team funds for supplies and travel with the stipulation that they had to take a measured, analytical approach to designing and building their machine. “Our sponsor wanted to see math in addition to guess and check,” Terosky said. “If someone’s giving you money, you want to make them proud.”

Speaking over the phone, Chatfield sounded as much like a businessman as an engineer. Chatfield said that “the kind of cobble-it-together, craftsman approach” to building Rube Goldberg machines was outdated. “The more modern approach is more process-oriented,” he said. “Engineering’s all about numbers — what are the numbers, what do the numbers mean….Any product that you design that’s done in that brutal way is just not competitive in the marketplace. And that’s not the skill that you want your engineers to really have.”

“Humor can be a design objective,” Chatfield told me. “But, I mean, how do you quantify humor?”

The SES team devised a machine that illustrates a school calendar. The team broke into four groups, each responsible for designing and building separate sections that roughly correspond to the seasons and come together to navigate the viewer through the school year. Holidays and changes in the weather are dramatized: a Santa dumps presents down a chimney for Christmas; water, signifying spring rain, pours through a tap into a bucket.

Much to everyone’s surprise — including their own — SES took first place at regionals. “We did not expect to win,” Terosky said. “We were just hoping not to embarrass ourselves.” By winning, they qualified for nationals; by qualifying for nationals, they found themselves facing a new set of problems. “Our machine is… not very durable,” Terosky said. The drive to the hotel where regionals took place was only 15 minutes, and even in that time parts broke.

“Before making a basic frame, we had to recognize that this has to come apart and go somewhere else. This is a real engineering problem, when you’re making airplanes or amusement park rides. It’s the most applicable to the real world of engineering, the biggest challenge of the whole competition,” she conceded.

By Saturday morning, the day of the nationals, SES has set up and tested their machine. The space begins to fill up with a crowd of three or four hundred people, many of them children. A cherry-picker in the middle of the room is rigged with a camera: during the judging process, video of the machines is streamed and projected onto an overwhelmingly large screen over the stage, where, afterwards, awards are presented.

SES are set up right next to last year’s champions from Purdue. Rube Goldberg machines are fickle by design, and one errant step can derail the best-laid machine. The champions’ first test-run of the day fails almost immediately. “First question,” someone from PSPE asks. “Is it plugged in?” It’s not. Someone jumps up, plugs it in, and the machine runs without issue, telling the story of Rube looking for a comic he’d drawn, and lost.

The machine moves through 73 steps in less than a minute, suggesting a desperate search by Rube as he upends his house looking for the comic. At one point, a ball drops, and a mechanized dog springs out of his house to grab it. The machine finishes — the cartoon was in a cupboard — and Dexys Midnight Runners’ “Come On, Eileen” plays. (The name of the machine, I learn, is “Eileen.”)

“I feel like everyone involved in Rube Goldberg nowadays is really looking to push the limits in terms of engineering feats,” junior and team president Jordan Vallejo told me when I spoke to her on the phone before the competition. She was on the team last year, too, and appeared with them on Jimmy Kimmel. “It’s becoming harder to make these machines humorous and playful, but it’s important to try,” she said. “A lot of people think of engineering as a very serious career. Which it is! But it’s important to take things lightly, to laugh, to learn from mistakes.”

On the other side of SES sits the Iowa State team. The eye is drawn to this machine in a way that it is not with the others, which are spiky and chaotic and sort of hard to look at. When Iowa State arrived the night before, other teams stopped and stared — even the champions from Purdue sat up a little bit straighter. The machine is detailed and precise, like the others, but without appearing precarious or spindly. As they assembled it, Rube Goldberg’s granddaughter, Jennifer George, raised her eyebrows. “I’ll be interested to see if it works,” she said.

On Saturday morning, Iowa State is having difficulties. Their machine is designed to resemble a big-screen television, divided into 12 boxes that contain iconic scenes from movies that the contraption will enact, one after another: a “Movie Marathon Machine,” for watching a dozen movies in three minutes. To everyone’s frustration, the truck from The Dark Knight won’t flip. The machine was built 1,000 feet above sea level — lower than Columbus — in an uninsulated shed — colder than Columbus. The team says the condition changes are preventing the air compression device meant to flip the truck from generating sufficient force. After a half-dozen incremental pressure increases, the truck is flipping properly — but then, something starts smoking. “It’s an effect,” one team member jokes while another scrambles up a ladder to fan away the haze. “It’s a really good effect.”

Late in the morning, judging begins. Surrounded by a crowd of the teams’ families, visitors, and lots of children, the judges move counterclockwise around the room. Before each run, teams have three minutes to introduce and narrate the scenarios their machines depict — crews are judged here on their showmanship and storytelling ability.

A team from Penn State’s Harrisburg campus is decked out in Star Wars and Star Trek costumes as they present their machine, “Out of this World: Tale of an Outer-Space Pinball.” It’s hard to follow what is happening in this machine — many of the steps are small, move too quickly, or are hidden behind other, more prominent elements. Apparently, buried somewhere in the machine, there is a miniature Gauss cannon, which one of the judges will later describe as “basically a railgun, it’s pretty cool.”

The University of Wisconsin-Barron County’s machine is a saccharine, barely functioning tribute to a retiring engineering professor. Then come the Purdue champions. PSPE’s experience as engineers and storytellers is evident; their speaker is comfortable describing “Eileen” to the growing crowd. During deliberations, one judge would describe the machine itself as the year’s “most Rube Goldberg-ian.” The mechanized dog fetching a dropped ball is a big hit.

SES follows Purdue. Terosky is nervous as she describes their machine, but she is funny and entertaining — the calendar machine, working its way through the year in a matter of seconds, doesn’t have a narrative story, exactly, so much as an amusing description of one event after another. The machine’s first run is perfect — the machine doesn’t stop once; an intervention is necessary on the second run, however: “I’m trying not to be disappointed, just because other people are,” Terosky tells me. “Gotta keep morale up.” The crowd, which includes 30 or 40 elementary school-aged children, cheers when an eraser finally wipes the board clean.

After SES, the judges and crowd turn to Iowa State. Its first run on Saturday morning — in front of the judges — is the first time that the team has tried to run the machine from start to finish. Steps start triggering out of order and then the whole thing — which, it turns out, is essentially a very long and elaborate marble-run — sets off all at once. One Iowa State team member has to get up and move the marble along with his finger, ushering it through one scene after another.

It comes as no surprise when PSPE repeats as champions, taking home both the first place prize as well as the prize for Funniest Step. Second place goes to another team from Purdue, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, whose machine — a “haunted” classroom — subverts the task by pouring slime over a chalkboard. Penn State SES, with their rickety, mostly cardboard machine, takes third. Iowa State is awarded Best Design, “even though it didn’t really work that well, and it wasn’t really a Rube Goldberg machine,” Jennifer George said as she presented the award.

A year after her father died in 2007, Jennifer George attended the Rube Goldberg competition for the first time. “Showing up as Rube’s granddaughter, you’re kind of like this strange mascot,” she told me. “It’s like being mother to many, many children.” What she saw there upset her. “Some of those machines were so spectacularly beautiful, but beautiful in a way that a car is a beautiful machine,” George recalled. “The winning machine was basically a glorified marble run,” she said, repeating her criticism of Iowa’s machine. “A beautiful, precision marble run. But it was not a Rube Goldberg machine. There was nothing about it that was a Rube Goldberg machine.”

A week after the competition, I spoke to Iowa State senior Brendan Favo, who designed his school’s mechanical movie-watching contraption. “Had our machine worked, we would have been in contention,” he said. “We were trying to make a machine that was interesting visually, to push what ‘Rube Goldberg’ means.” Maybe; maybe not.

The team worked on their device every Saturday and Sunday from the beginning of January up until the competition, with some weeknights thrown in as well. “I hate to tell you this, but I don’t really know why I did it,” Favo told me when I asked why he’d spent three long months working on the machine. “At no time while doing it did I question why — it was fun. But there’s no great explanation why I built the machine.” He added, “I just saw it as an opportunity to build something.”

Almost a century old, Rube Goldberg machines retain their appeal: “There’s something in our brains that likes to see cause and effect played out, to see it in a way that we can understand,” Joseph Herscher, the Brooklyn-based artist, told me. Herscher has judged at the past three college national competitions but was absent this year. “Most of the technology we live with is designed to be invisible,” he said. “A computer is the ultimate example: it’s so advanced, so sophisticated, and yet it’s not interesting to watch it run whatsoever.” When we watch the movements of a Rube Goldberg machine, “it’s our world that we’re seeing, and it makes us appreciate our world. You don’t see that nowadays.”

Meanwhile, most of Goldberg’s comics seem dated: the jokes don’t make sense or are lame, and cultural references fall flat. But some feel as relevant ever, and maybe that’s because the technical absurdities that the cartoonist parodied are still very real. Our modern era is riddled with machines doing ever less consequential tasks in ever more complex ways. The machines are digital, not mechanical, but the difference between the maximalism of the Rube Goldberg machine and the minimalism of the iPhone is perhaps not so great after all.

There are apps that seemingly accomplish the simplest thing — hailing a cab — in the simplest way: a push of a button. But that simple task is the work of thousands of lines of code, hundreds of developers, a billion dollars, and drivers that have gone into making that button do what it does. The mechanisms of our world are not necessarily any more efficient than they’ve ever been; they’re just more obscure, hidden in the invisible digital distance behind our screens. And just like in Goldberg’s cartoons, there are living things — human beings, even — caught up in the machine, carrying out their tasks in chain reaction, their movements as sure as gravity itself.

White-tailed deer are not particularly large animals, but they are muscular and athletic, some reportedly able to jump over fences 10 feet high. The tails from which they derive their name stick up jauntily over their rears as they run away from you.

Before European colonization, North America was home to somewhere between 24 and 33 million white-tailed deer, most widely distributed east of the Rocky Mountains. In the following centuries, that population was destroyed — first by traders operating out of coastal cities, making deals with Native Americans for pelts; then by settlers moving out West. Deer died by the hundreds of thousands as the market grew for their meat and hides.

But it was the the second half of the 19th century that truly decimated animal populations across the United States. In his book Nature Wars, wildlife historian, journalist, and hunter Jim Sterba writes, “All wildlife suffered, from bison to songbirds. Demand for wild products soared as immigrants poured in and the US population grew to 76 million. Any wild species with any value was killed for meat, fur, or feathers.”

The white-tailed population plummeted to an estimated low of 350,000 animals in 1890. According to Serba, “by the end of the 19th century white-tailed deer were so scarce that market hunters no longer bothered with them.”

“By the end of the 19th century white-tailed deer were so scarce that market hunters no longer bothered with them.”

Then, thanks to a set of concepts and policies referred to as the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, the deer made a tremendous comeback. The model, encouraged by a rising American bourgeoisie that yearned for recreational hunting, established a series of principles to promote rebounding deer populations: create protected green spaces where commercial hunting was banned; foster safe and abundant spaces for regulated, recreational hunting; and further discourage predator species that had essentially already been eradicated. The logic was simple: you can’t hunt the deer if all the deer are already dead.

As a result, the United States now has over 30 million white-tailed deer, much more densely populated than they ever were before Europeans arrived. Unchecked by wolves, cougars, and bears, the herds wreak havoc: a 2012 Rutgers University study alleges that white-tailed deer are responsible for most of the $4.5 billion worth of crops that US agriculture loses to wildlife annually; they account for three to four thousand car collisions a day. New Jersey alone had 31,192 deer collisions from 2011 to 2012. Unchecked by predators or hunters, only starvation will limit population growth.

To bring a native species back from the brink of eradication should be cause for celebration — in this respect, the revival of white-tailed deer is one of the conservation movement’s finest accomplishments. But our understanding of what is best for the deer, for people, and for the wider ecosystem is, perhaps, changing. And success is starting to resemble failure.

To combat Staten Island’s deer, New York City has pulled together 22 people into a newly organized NYC Interagency Deer Management Task Force. Representatives from the Environmental Conservation are present, but so are employees of the Department of Transportation, Sanitation, Emergency Management, NYPD, USDA, and others. The task force, chaired by the Parks Department’s director of conservation Kevin Heatley, had its first official meeting this past December. There, the team came to two conclusions: The deer are a problem. The city needs to do something about the deer.

“It’s not the number of deer, it’s the density,” Heatley told me. At 41 deer per square mile of Staten Island, he said, “The numbers are four times as high as we’d like them to be.” The task force will aim to lower that density to fewer than 15 animals per square mile. But no one can agree on when this will happen, or how.

The task force has three priorities: monitor the animals and their impact; educate the public about deer behavior; and manage the population. It is this last goal that’s the most difficult and controversial. Communities like Staten Island — largely developed, if not entirely urban, with plenty of green space — have essentially four primary management methods available to them: two lethal and two non-lethal. Lethal methods include regulated culls (i.e. hiring government sharpshooters) and recreational hunting. Non-lethal methods include the application of a contraceptive and surgical sterilization. The fifth option — which isn’t really an option but rather the current state of affairs — is to do nothing at all.

“Pursuing, shooting, killing, or capturing” as well as “disturbing, harrying, or worrying” wildlife is prohibited in all five boroughs of New York City and carries a penalty of a year in jail, a $2,000 fine, or both. That hasn’t stopped some: In 2007, The New York Times reported hunters roaming Staten Island’s Clay Pit Pond State Park.

“To just come up and start killing them seems cruel. They’re innocent — they don’t know.”

Margherita Grancio-Rubertone lives near Freshkills Park, across the street from a cemetery where a deer was once found impaled on the fence (the victim of an unfortunate jumping accident). “It’s not a good idea, hunting,” she told me. “To just come up and start killing them seems cruel. They’re innocent — they don’t know.” The relative density of Staten Island would also make hunting difficult, or at least uncomfortable. “It would be pretty dangerous, with the deer right across from your house,” Grancio-Rubertone said. “God forbid, whatever might happen.”

In February of 2013, a Staten Island Advance reporter asked Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota, a former head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority who hunts deer in upstate New York, what he made of the growing deer sightings on Staten Island. Lhota was in town to pick up an assemblyman’s endorsement. “The next mayor is going to have to figure out how hunting is going to work,” Lhota said, adding that if hunting were to be permitted on the island, it would have to be bowhunting. “Not everybody believes in hunting,” Lhota said. “So we need to have a public debate.” Lhota later denied making the comments; the Advance reporter stuck by his story, and the paper ended up running an editorial condemning the idea of allowing hunting in the borough anyway.

The task force does not consider hunting to be a viable option for Staten Island, and just as well — recreational hunting on its own has been found to be an insufficient means of population control. One study even found that bowhunters in New Jersey and Pennsylvania who were permitted unlimited tags, could shoot deer over bait, and were working during extended seasons still could not reduce the size of deer herds to sustainable levels.

One of the study’s co-authors was Anthony DeNicola, founder of a non-profit called White Buffalo, which provides wildlife control services using lethal and nonlethal methods. DeNicola’s doctoral dissertation at Purdue University was on deer contraceptives; he claims to have killed more than 10,000 deer since he founded White Buffalo in 1995. “People have a hard time accepting ‘responsibility’ for taking an animal’s life, but at what cost to the animal’s quality of life?” he asked when we spoke. Communities hire White Buffalo to manage their wildlife when that wildlife has run amok.

DeNicola is not optimistic that the residents of Staten Island or legislators in a city like New York are going to accept widespread lethal deer culls. “When you’re dealing with people who live in the New York metropolitan area, they have no day-to-day exposure to nature, to living with nature. The idea of killing animals like deer has a very visceral impact,” DeNicola said. “Given the degree of urbanization, your ability to educate, to sway public perception becomes very hard — to get people to understand the need to cull? Good luck. Ideally, you’d pursue an integrated solution” — a mix of lethal and non-lethal methods. “Practically? Not. Gonna. Happen.”

White Buffalo has experimented with surgical sterilization, which DeNicola believes will play a greater role in deer management as time goes on. “Most locations that have deer problems have firearm restrictions,” he observed. “The data keep reinforcing that sterilization may have some utility.” But labor-intensive sterilization is an expensive proposition: you have to catch the deer, and you need someone who is competent in the surgical sterilization process available to perform the act — the bill comes out to around $1,000 per doe.

“Tony’s been doing a lot of the surgical sterilization work, and he has a great team to do that,” Allen Rutberg, director of Tufts University’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, told me. “I just don’t think that his team can be replicated in an efficient manner.”

Rutberg is researching a different non-lethal method of deer management: immunocontraception, or birth control. Last year, he and his team began an experiment with this method in the town of Hastings-on-Hudson, just north of New York City in Westchester County. Hastings, a two-square-mile area, is estimated to be home to around 120 deer; there were 16 car collisions involving deer here in 2011, and the mayor, his wife, and their child all contracted deer-borne Lyme disease. Rutberg’s method involves tranquilizing, tagging, and applying the vaccine to each deer once every two years; similar experiments on Fire Island reduced deer populations in some areas by as much as 50 percent. Rutberg’s contraceptive method costs around $500 per deer, though he argues that if government regulations requiring him to tag each deer were lifted, he could bring that cost down to $100.

One of the things we like about the sort of contraception that we do is that it seems to be a sort of comfortable, consensus solution,” Rutberg said. “It doesn’t involve killing anything, it’s not too invasive, we don’t have to do surgery on the animals, but at the same time it keeps the problem under control. It seems like a nice compromise between treating them as pests and treating them as pets and treating them as nature’s gift.”

But building a consensus in any community can be a laborious process, especially in a place with as many stakeholders and interest groups as New York City. “A consensus-based approach is never going to work on a controversial issue,” DeNicola told me. “You can try educating, but in the time it takes to do that you’ll have deer up to your eyeballs.”

The best case scenario for Staten Island, he said, is that five years from now a management method will be agreed on. “Meanwhile, the forest is denuded, Lyme disease spreads, and collisions increase,” he said. “The deer are happy!” But as for the city? “They are well on their way to a major headache.”

Heatley, the head of the NYC Interagency Deer Management Task Force, shares DeNicola’s concern — whatever method the city decides on, time is of the essence if Staten Island is going to solve its deer problem. “When your house is on fire, you go get a bucket. You don’t measure the temperature of the flames,” he told me. “The deer situation is a wildfire.”

Deer aren’t the only animals adapting and flourishing in the landscapes we’ve created: in 1974, only 325 pairs of peregrine falcons were left in all of North America. Today they thrive in cities, whose skylines imitate the falcon’s ancestral habitats along cliffs and canyons: the New York State DEC reports that peregrine falcons nest on every bridge over the Hudson River south of Albany. The world’s largest urban bat colony numbering around 1.5 million — is located underneath downtown Austin’s Congress Avenue Bridge. A wolf-coyote hybrid is spreading through the Northeast from above the Great Lakes, via the Appalachians — its size and weight making it a more fearsome predator than its pure-coyote predecessors. Some 2,000 coyotes have moved from the suburbs around Chicago into the city’s downtown, and coyotes from Westchester County — just north of Manhattan — have made it as far south as TriBeCa. Just a few days ago, one was caught on the Upper West Side.

The distinction between nature and civilization has always been a delusional abstraction at best, and a justification for the exploitation of natural resources at worst. We are, at all times, amongst nature, and it is amongst us whether we see it or not. And now the deer, the coyotes, and others are coming back to remind us of the fact.

“Humans have forgotten that they have a role in nature,” the Department of Agriculture Forest Service’s Thomas Rawinski told me. “We have to take responsibility for the problem, we have to look at ourselves as part of this ecosystem.” Human beings shattered the landscape of this continent, only to decide that we preferred it the other way. But putting the puzzle back together is proving to be harder than we imagined.

On Staten Island, that shattered landscape isn’t just made up of deer: the island is also struggling with a flock of wild turkeys. For the past 15 years, the birds have made the campus of the South Beach Psychiatric Center their home. It all started with nine captive-bred birds that were released onto hospital grounds in 2000. Since then, the flock has grown. Meanwhile, the turkey’s fecal matter is tracked into the hospital buildings, Ben Rosen, a spokesperson for the Office of Mental Health, told me. The birds are obstructing emergency vehicles making their way in and out of the hospital.

In August 2013, several turkeys were captured by hand and with nets, placed into crates, and shipped to a “state-approved processing facility,” according to a statement given at the time by a USDA spokesperson to the Staten Island Advance. Their meat was to be frozen and its suitability for human consumption tested.

But the cull sparked a public outrage and was officially halted in September; an estimated 45 turkeys remained on the psych ward grounds. The DEC made accommodations for 28 of the birds to be transported to an enclosed space at the Catskill Environmental Sanctuary instead. The USDA, which is now handling the relocation process, is employing several different capture methodologies — pre-baited walk-in traps, weighted nets that are launched over turkeys by air cannons, and hand nets — over short periods of time to prevent the turkeys from catching on and finding other places to roost.

It’s taken New York City 15 years to address the chaos caused by nine turkeys. One shudders to think how long it will take the city to tackle a population of 800 furiously procreating deer.

DeNicola laughed when I told him about the island’s turkey troubles. Getting rid of turkeys is easy, he scoffed. Deer are another case altogether. “You’re not gonna relocate deer,” he told me with a smirk in his voice. “You’re stuck with the deer. You handle them there.”