Chris Doty runs the road department for Deschutes County, and by late June he was fielding questions about wildlife instead of asphalt.
"We do not know who (or what) is placing the deer. At present the deer represent a humorous placeholder, however at some point we will be ushering them back to the forest."
The deer he's talking about are made of pine rounds, and they started showing up inside the brand-new roundabout at South Century Drive and Huntington Road sometime in mid-June, not long after the intersection reopened to traffic. Nobody claimed them. Nobody explained them. And for a crossing that spent years working its way through a county transportation plan, the deer turned out to be the least surprising part of the story.
A Long Wait for One Intersection
South Century Drive carries Sunriver and Three Rivers traffic out to Highway 97, and several of the platted subdivisions in Three Rivers South lean on Huntington Road as their paved connection to that route. The crossing had been a known problem long before anyone broke ground. Deschutes County's 2020-2040 Transportation System Plan flagged Huntington Road and South Century Drive as a high-priority project, one of only two county intersections in the plan projected to hit Level of Service "F," the traffic engineering shorthand for an intersection that's effectively failed at moving cars through it.
The county walked residents through early design concepts at an online open house in spring 2025, refined the plan after a second round that winter, and started construction that September. The work stretched into spring 2026. Huntington Road closed outright for two weeks in April, from the South Century Drive intersection to about 500 feet south of it, with drivers detoured onto Vandevert Road, U.S. 97, and State Recreation Road while a temporary signal guided traffic through the work zone. Delays ran up to 20 minutes at busy times. The county's target for substantial completion was June 30, and the roundabout opened for good around that date.
What Actually Opened
What came out of that year of construction was a single-lane roundabout with pedestrian and bicycle safety improvements built into the design, new signage, fresh pavement markings, and a center island landscaped with rock mulch and boulders. The broader South Century Drive corridor plan also calls for at-grade crossings and Rapid Rectangular Flashing Beacons at points along the route, the kind of detail that matters more to someone walking a dog across that intersection than to anyone just driving through it. For a road that had been getting harder to cross every year the area grew, it was a real fix, not a cosmetic one.
For a few weeks, that center island sat close to bare, waiting on the landscaping crew.
Then Somebody Brought in the Deer
One deer, carved from pine rounds, appeared with no explanation. More joined it within days. By the following Friday, the herd had grown to six. Someone then borrowed the move that made Bend's own roundabout art go viral back in 2024, when googly eyes started turning up on public sculptures around the city, including Big Ears at 14th Street and Simpson Avenue and Orb I at Skyliners Road and Mount Washington Drive. That stunt eventually landed a bit on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and cost the City of Bend roughly $1,500 to remove the adhesive without damaging the art underneath.
In Three Rivers, the same trick showed up on the wooden deer. Then a pink flamingo joined the herd. By the following Monday, the googly eyes were gone and the deer count had dropped to four. Whoever keeps adding to or subtracting from the display hasn't said a word, and the county has been clear that it isn't the one doing it, just the one deciding how long to let it run. Doty told reporters the county is aware of the artwork and asked the public to stay out of the center island for safety reasons, since it sits in the middle of an active roundabout. The story kept shifting through the following week, with deer disappearing and reappearing and no clearer answer on who started it.
The Corridor Isn't Finished
South Century Drive isn't done changing. A second roundabout at Spring River Road is scheduled for construction throughout 2027, and the Venture Lane intersection is next after that, ranked as a medium priority in the same transportation plan. Combined, the three projects along this corridor carry a price tag of $10 million, funded through the county's road program rather than any single development nearby. For anyone who drives this stretch on a regular basis, that means more construction seasons ahead, more temporary signals, and more lane shifts on a route the county is clearly treating as one long project rather than three separate repairs.
The landscaping contract for the Huntington Road roundabout calls for tree planting this fall, the same season this is being written in. That's the permanent fix for the bare center island, the one that was always part of the design long before any deer showed up. Whether the wooden herd, whatever's left of it, sticks around through the planting or gets quietly relocated back to the forest is still an open question. So is who started the whole thing. The intersection itself isn't a mystery anymore. It took a transportation plan dated back to 2020, a full construction season, and a two-week road closure to get there, and the deer just happened to move in before the trees did.
We drive that roundabout often enough to have opinions about where the flamingo should go, and we'll be curious to see what the tree planting does to the herd count this fall. If you've spotted something new out there, or you're just tracking what else is changing along South Century Drive, Bend Homes and Land is always up for comparing notes.
