New York

The white-tailed deer of Harlem will live on.

After a whipsaw day of conflicting narratives and jockeying between the offices of New York City’s mayor and the governor, a beloved buck that had taken up residence in a park in Harlem was granted a last-minute reprieve from death row late on Thursday.

The buck had been captured on the grounds of a public-housing complex on West 155th Street around 4 a.m. Thursday after he wandered out of Jackie Robinson Park, where he had been drawing crowds for two weeks.

Early in the day, the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio had said the deer would be killed because officials at the state Environmental Conservation Department said he would have to be released near where he was caught and could not be relocated elsewhere.

In an email to a city parks department official on Thursday afternoon, Ken Scarlatelli, a state wildlife biologist, wrote: “Bottom line is the options are release back into Harlem or euthanasia.”

“We’re sort of backed into a corner here,” a spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio, Natalie Grybauskas, had said on Thursday afternoon. “It’s not so much a decision as it is, ‘This is the option.’” She said it did not make sense to release the deer back into a densely populated neighborhood.

The state’s own guidelines require a permit to capture and relocate deer and say that “permits are not issued to relocate deer to the wild because acceptable release sites are not available and because the poor chances for deer survival do not warrant the risks.”

At 7 p.m., the East Harlem animal shelter where the buck had been taken said it had just received orders from the city to put the animal to death.

But at 8 p.m., the office of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo released a statement saying that “Governor Cuomo has directed DEC to offer assistance to the city to transport and find a new habitat for it immediately.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/nyregion/harlem-deer-is-captured.html?