ANN ARBOR, MI - It's late Friday afternoon and Bob McGee and a team of volunteers are gathered in a maintenance shed at Huron Hills Golf Course.

They're getting ready for another long night and waiting for the next whitetail deer to arrive for ovary removal at this makeshift operating room.

Steve Timm, a veterinarian from Wisconsin, is serving as lead surgeon, with assistance from Katherine Dyer, a veterinarian with offices in Wixom and Waterford, and Amanda Fell, a vet tech from Ann Arbor Animal Hospital.

As they prepare the surgical tools and equipment they'll need for the night, McGee, the former mayor of Ferndale and founder of Ann Arbor Residents for Non-Lethal Deer Management, is checking his iPhone, using two apps to communicate with and track the whereabouts of other team members, including biologists in the field darting deer in nearby neighborhoods.

As the volunteer coordinator, McGee is here to help make sure things go smoothly, and so far he says they have.

He's assisting White Buffalo Inc., a Connecticut-based nonprofit wildlife control company hired by the city of Ann Arbor.

Since last Sunday, when the city-funded and state-permitted experimental operation started, the team has successfully sterilized 53 female deer and returned them to the urban wild in Ann Arbor.

They're operating each day from late afternoon past midnight into the early morning hours, and by Sunday, Jan. 29, the operation will be complete. They're on track to hit their target of sterilizing 60 deer, and they're permitted to go up to 80.

This is one piece of a multi-pronged strategy to control Ann Arbor's deer population, complementing lethal methods that start on Monday, Jan. 30.

Time to roll

At 5:04 p.m. Friday, McGee receives notification that White Buffalo's biologists have just darted another deer over at the Cedar Bend Nature Area.

"Do you guys want to roll on that?" he says, turning to the volunteers who are part of the transport team.

Within a half hour, they're back with the deer, lifting her off the back of a pickup truck and bringing her into the shed at the city-owned golf course.

Now laid out on a long table, the deer receives a round of injections, including anesthesia, pain meds and antibiotics.

After that's done, Timm shaves the area where they'll be making about a four-inch incision to remove the ovaries.

The deer, now blindfolded, is moved to a second table and all four legs are tied down with rope at about 5:36 p.m. before surgery starts.

The team is careful to be quiet and whispers so not to startle the animal. Even though the deer is under anesthesia and not moving much other than breathing, they explain, she still can sense the presence of humans.

At 5:40 p.m., the team is ready to start surgery. It goes quickly. They immediately find the ovaries, while also noticing the deer is pregnant.

Timm says most of the females are pregnant this time of year, and in many cases, the removal of ovaries will not only permanently sterilize the deer but also terminate the pregnancy and prevent the birth of fawns in the spring.

By 5:48 p.m., Dyer is stitching up the first deer of the night, and the 52nd one this week. Surgery complete.

Two minutes later, a second deer arrives at the operating room and the process repeats while the first deer recovers on another table nearby.

Fell, who is there along with colleague Matt Dyer, manager of the Ann Arbor Animal Hospital, monitors heart rates to make sure the deer are doing OK. They're there as volunteers and the hospital has donated supplies.

By 5:57 p.m., the first deer is loaded back onto a pickup truck to be returned to the Cedar Bend Nature Area.

Less than 45 minutes later, the second deer also is being returned near where it was captured in a neighborhood off Hill Street south of Geddes Avenue.

Christine Oldenburg-McGee, a physician assistant from Ann Arbor, is part of the volunteer recovery team, helping return deer to the urban wild.

At 6:45 p.m., she sits with the second deer of the night, now wrapped in a blanket, next to a row of trees on an expansive lawn on Burson Place, where the homeowner has given permission to use the property as a release site.

After Timm administers a reversal drug, Oldenburg-McGee continues holding up the animal's head until the anesthesia wears off.

Several minutes go by. It's cold outside.

By 6:58 p.m., the deer, still dazed and confused, begins to look around but isn't quite ready to try getting up. Oldenburg-McGee and Timm stand nearby.

Several more minutes go by while the deer remains mostly still, occasionally looking up before resting her head again.

The deer checks out her new wound, the stitched-up incision, multiple times before making a first attempt to stand at 7:24 p.m.

She falls down.

She tries a second time a minute later. Same result.

On a third try at 7:26 p.m., the deer rises to her feet, stumbling slightly as she staggers away like someone who's had too much to drink.

"She'll walk it off," Timm says, adding the deer probably will be able to trot again in another 15 minutes and will be back to normal in a couple hours.

At 7:30 p.m., Oldenburg-McGee and Timm hop in the pickup truck and head back to the operating room, leaving the deer.

'This is research'

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources approved the city's deer sterilization plan as an experimental research program.

All of the deer that are sterilized are being outfitted with ear tags with numbers that they'll wear back in the wild, and several will have radio collars to track their whereabouts for further research and followup in the next year.

Timm said he met Tony DeNicola, president of White Buffalo Inc., about 20 years ago and they've been working together on deer sterilization programs in communities across the country for several years now.

"Seven or eight years ago, we actually started our first project in Town and Country, Missouri, which is a suburb of St. Louis," he said, adding they sterilized about 100 deer in 10 days while there.

Surgical sterilization was something they decided they could do, Timm said, and so they designed a program that's been repeated in several communities across the United States, now for the first time in Michigan.

"The thinking is if the deer are spayed, their population numbers go down very slowly, 20 percent a year approximately, and the surrounding deer don't invade," Timm said, noting it limits the number of fawns born each year.

"So we formulated this plan and have decided that wildlife management needs as many tools in the toolbox as possible. This is research. It's not a proven technique, and therefore the state and federal organizations that control the wildlife haven't agreed that this is going to be part of the management plan yet. As soon as it's proven or if it is proven effective, surgical sterilization will work," he said.

"There are vaccine programs that are highly intensive, and labor-intensive, money-intensive programs, and we decided, of course, so is this. But in certain situations where you can't do culling, don't want to do culling, shouldn't do culling/sharpshooting, this may be a very good plan of attack."

Timm said one of the goals of the program is to get the local crew educated and skilled enough to handle things.

"We have over 1,000 ovariectomies under our belt that I've either trained, been involved in, done myself or worked with people who can do it," he said.

"We've been in California and on the east coast primarily, and now into Michigan," he said. "The idea is good. I don't know if it's expanding, but generally we do two to four different projects a year from fall through mid-winter."

Depending on how far along the pregnancy is at the time of the ovary removal, it might or might not result in termination of the pregnancy.

"The physiology has not been proven," Timm said. "We see some fawns on the ground after this. We do see some of the fetuses that are terminated, and they're either absorbed or they're passed."

'Michigan deer are tough as nails'

Timm and DeNicola both said the sterilization efforts in Ann Arbor have gone smoothly and according to plan so far.

"Let's just say that Michigan deer are tough as nails," Timm said. "It seems like these deer are doing very well. We're not having complications either getting them to the table, on the table, or recovering, which is great."

Timm said some of the deer brought into the operating room had noticeable previous injuries, including one deer on Friday that appeared to have broken a leg at some point in the past. The leg had since healed. Another deer brought in on a recent night had a razor-sharp arrow stuck in her side.

"We don't see many of those," Timm said. "We've seen hernias from being hit by car. Certainly foreign bodies. You might find a bullet. I don't recall pulling any of those out (in Ann Arbor). I've only pulled out this arrow, and it was stuck in a bone, so we were able to take it out. It was a superficial hit. And the point was sticking out of the poor gal. We were able to take it out with no complication."

Timm said it initially looked like the arrow had gone through the chest and that he might be pulling out potentially up to a foot of arrow, so that was a little nerve-racking, but he determined it was only a superficial hit, leaving about four inches of the broken arrow, including the razor tip, lodged behind the scapula.

"Deer specifically are very forgiving; they're survivors," he said. "They do very well with contamination from a foreign body like that. You and I would be septic and in the hospital with a draining, nasty wound. And in this particular case, she was perfectly fit, but it must have been painful at some point."

It's unclear when and where the deer was shot with the arrow and whether it was done legally or illegally, but Timm said it seemed to be an old wound.

"It was at least a month or more old," he said.

DeNicola, who is out in the field doing the darting with three other biologists, stopped by the operating room for a break and a bite to eat shortly after 8 p.m. Friday. They had been working from bait sites and were about to switch to a mobile phase for the remainder of the night.

"So far everything is going as predicted," he said. "Most of these programs, after doing so many, the outcomes are almost to the point of being engineered."

DeNicola said he and his team have to make discretionary calls about which deer to dart, and they pass on fawns.

"We'll pass on them this year," he said. "It's not likely they'd be pregnant. And it just increases the risk of complications with a smaller animal, between the capture and the surgery, so those animals will be yearlings next year and then we would capture them at that point."

They're working in two broad study areas with five active bait sites in an area south of the Huron River and two active bait sites in an area north of the river. He said there were some other bait sites in the northern area where there wasn't much deer activity, so they didn't pursue darting there.

DeNicola, who will be leading efforts to shoot and kill up to another 100 deer in Ann Arbor starting Monday, said it's more logical to do a lethal cull before sterilization, but in this case, due to the timing, being later in the season with the stage of pregnancies, they did the nonlethal first to be most effective.

Now his team just has to look out for deer with ear tags before firing any shots in designated shooting zones over the next two weeks.

DeNicola said he's actively juggling two sterilization efforts at the moment, the one in Ann Arbor and another in Staten Island, New York.

He said this is about the 10th or 11th community where he's done this type of program from California to Minnesota, Virginia and Connecticut.

'This crew is stellar'

Lorraine Shapiro, a local physician who has lobbied the city to try nonlethal deer management methods as an alternative to killing, said what's happening in Ann Arbor right now is groundbreaking for the state of Michigan.

"This is a research project and it's the first time it's been done in Michigan," she said, noting she and others have started a nonprofit organization to raise money to help offset the city's costs, and so far they have nearly $15,000.

Shapiro also is volunteering with the sterilization effort, doing everything from cleaning up blood in the operating room to delivering food for the team.

"I'm an animal lover, always have been, and I was appalled by the city's plan and action last year when they killed 63 deer," she said. "And I just wanted to get involved. And when I heard there were other alternatives that could be done under a research proposal, I really wanted to do my part to make that happen."

Shapiro said she and other nonlethal advocates, including McGee, met with city officials a number of times over the past year to reach consensus on a plan that included sterilization. It's their hope that the city eventually can just use nonlethal methods to control the population once it's at a level deemed acceptable.

"To actually see this being put into place, it's been very exciting," Shapiro said. "I've been here every night and every morning."

Altogether, more than 60 people volunteered to help out, including several veterinarians and vet techs, McGee said.

He said more people offered to volunteer than they needed, so only about half of them were put to work, while the rest were thanked for offering.

McGee has been volunteering about 15 hours a day for the past week, getting up at 1 p.m., getting to the operating room by 4 p.m. and leaving sometime after 5 a.m. Not all of the volunteers are working those same long hours. Shifts are broken up so some work up to 11:30 p.m. when a second shift arrives.

McGee is tasked with enforcing operating room rules, running communications and keeping meticulous notes about each deer, documenting when and where they were captured and released, their tag numbers and other information.

Timm said there were four deer in a row going through surgery at one point the other night and the volunteers did a great job handling it. He's the only person in the operating room who isn't a volunteer.

"I'm really grateful for the people who have showed up and really helped out," he said. "This crew is stellar."

For each deer that goes through the sterilization procedure, McGee said, it's a life saved. He said each ear tag is a "get out of jail free" card, and those deer now can live out the rest of their lives instead of being shot.

"And that means the world to me," he said.

McGee said he hopes the research being done in Ann Arbor eventually can show other communities wrestling with the issue of deer management that nonlethal methods, which are often less controversial than killing, can work as a solution that doesn't tear apart the social fabric of the community.

Kurt Sonen, an Ann Arbor resident who supports lethal sharpshooting and is a member of the pro-culling group Washtenaw Citizens for Ecological Balance, is among the volunteers helping with the nonlethal efforts this week.

He believes sterilization is a great way to get a handle on the deer population in residential areas where sharpshooting cannot occur.

"I know there are places they're pulling deer out where there's absolutely no park nearby that they were going to get those deer lethally," he said.

"So, yeah, I think this is a nice hybrid solution."

As for whether the city might be able to transition away from culling and use only nonlethal methods, Sonen said he's curious to see where things go.

"I really think there will come a year, relatively soon, where you've taken out the deer eligible for lethal and you've sterilized the other deer, assuming the City Council continues on with this, and you'd be pretty much in a stasis mode."