First of all, try to find the visitor center (it's tucked in a strip mall, hard to find). They can give you ideas of where to park and wait for deer or other areas to go to look for wildlife. Basically, though, you just drive around looking for deer. I ended up seeing three so it was totally worth it. A nice stop if you have some time to just drive around and look for deer.

My husband and I drove though Deer Key, not realizing that the entire key was the refuge; we tried to hunt down for a specific park, but had to return to the visitor's center, only to learn that the deer are scattered around and there's no specific place to look for them. They did try to recommend some areas where they were known to forage, but no luck whatsoever - the best opportunities we had were just random opportunities while driving by. So don't spend too much time hunting for deer here; if anything, go to the visitor's center and go where they recommend.

Key Deer Refuge and the Blue Hole are gems amongst all the commercial and water focused Keys. Great place to ride a bike and see unique Key foliage as well as the deer.
On Fridays in season the refuge center offers informative walks with a fish and game ranger. I went twice and found Kristy very knowledgable and personable .
It's your tax dollars at work , take advantage!

At first we couldn't find the "station" to start at, so we just drove through the area on our own. We had 5 sightings of the deer in about a half hour drive and got some great pictures. You have to drive slowly and look into the brush, they are much smaller than regular deer. They seem to be quite docile, they will just stand and and continue eating or just look back at you. We'd stop the car and just watch from the car so as not to disturb them. They don't dart away, some were by the side of the road maybe less than 10 feet away from the car. They are lovely creatures to see.

We later drove back to our starting point and found the station which is actually in a small strip mall, and not what we were expecting so was easy to miss. We didn't have any more time at that point to stop in. We were quite happy with our experience there though.