Oh, deer! Sky Auto Collision gets rare rooftop visitor

A deer inexplicably found its way to the roof of a 15-foot-high Central Hamilton building Monday afternoon, lingering atop an auto body shop that boasts no outdoor stairs or ledges for about an hour while dismayed neighbours looked about in shock.

The young-looking deer was first spotted at around noon.

Maggie and Michael Martineau were standing on the second-floor balcony of their Hess Street North home as they entertained the visit of former neighbour Philippe Senecal, the three of them gazing below to the couple's plush garden in the front yard.

Then Michael goes, Hey - look! Look! Look!'" says Maggie, her husband motioning to the eye-level building across the street.

There, in plain daylight, a deer wondered about, looking dazed and confused, on the roof of Sky Auto Collison.

It looked scared, kind of freaking out and not understanding what was going on," Senecal says.

The deer roamed back and forth, at times teetering on the roof's edges.

It was trying to figure out how to get down and what was happening."

So, too, were the befuddled trio. How on earth, they thought, did a deer manage to get on top of a roof with no help - and in the city core, no less?

It's unusual to have a deer smack dab in the downtown core," Maggie says. In Westdale or Princess Point, we see them all the time. But this was really strange."

Meanwhile, Peter Woolcott, a local real estate agent, was just getting home for lunch when he was met by cries from the overhead watch party.

My neighbours called out to me and said, Peter, you're never going to see anything like this. There's a deer on top of the auto body shop,'" he says.

I thought they were kidding. Next thing I know, I turn around and there it is, up 14 or 15 feet high, just walking around and looking for an escape."

Maggie called the city's animal services division at about 12:15 p.m. The other two kept watch as Woolcott shot video of the deer, later posting it to the social medium Reddit where it garnered over 320 upvotes."

By 1 p.m., animal services arrived on scene. But the deer, which was at last sight not visible after moving to the backside of the roof, disappeared just as inexplicitly as it appeared.

Generally, if the wildlife got onto the roof, it should be able to get back down on its own," says Karen Edwards, the city's animal services adviser.

Regardless, Edwards says property owners ultimately bear the responsibility of any wildlife issues on their property.

(We) can assist, however we don't have the ability to go onto a roof."

The auto body shop is located between York and Barton streets in a commercial-residential area with little-to-no immediate green space. Bayfront Park sits about two-kilometres to the west across a web of railroad tracks. Then there's the lake, an unlikely source.

So where did the deer come from?

Well, no one really knows. It's a mystery to the aforementioned quartet of discoverers. And staff at Sky Auto Collision said they weren't even aware the deer had been there in the first place, let alone paced overhead of them.

One hypothesis, according to the neighbours, is as follows.

The deer came by way of Queen Street North, a geographically more elevated area than Hess, and cut through a string of backyards before climbing over an escarpment at the streets' border and onto the shop's roof.

It would have had access to all sort of trees there," Maggie says of the area behind Sky Collision Auto and Queen, because it's an area that's waiting to be developed."

The other, more likely hypothesis - which was reached after significant discussion - is that the deer made its way from the west. Through Bayfront," Maggie says, crossing the tracks and the brownfield on Hess (and York)," and eventually waddled up the street and to the roof.

I still have no idea," Woolcott admits, chuckling at the unlikeliness of it all. It just seems so strange how it got to where it ended up."

Sebastian Bron is a Hamilton-based reporter at The Spectator. Reach him via email: sbron@thespec.com