Canis lupus hominis

Posted in wildlife | Tagged white-tailed deer | 6 Comments

6 Responses

1. on November 13, 2012 at 10:10 pm massugu

   Saw a dwarf Whitetail buck the other day. He was about the same height as my neighbor’s standard goats but still packed much of the heft of a standard sized Whitetail.

   
   
2. on November 14, 2012 at 8:52 am chervilmeadow

   Handsome buck. We don’t have that species here of course, although there are some whitetails in Europe descended from introductions. Other species introduced into Britain include fallow, sika, reeves muntjac, chinese water, reindeer (one herd) siberian roe.

   The little muntjac – from India I believe, is the most common introduced species in England and it is spreading as we speak. This species seems well evolved for squeezing through woodland thickets and therefore also to fit into England’s suburbia where its small size and tiny rear facing antlers equip it well for getting through our ubiquitous English hedgerows. And once in the garden it has a wide selection of plants to choose from grown by our keen gardeners. However,most of us would not dream of harming the little darlings. We either put up fences (bearing in mind they can jump quite high) or take our own chosen option of planting stuff they don’t eat (which isn’t easy as they even eat ground cover ivies, for example, – which reminds me of an old song ending “and little lambs eat ivy, except substitute with “little deer…”

   And since Mary and I have chosen to live next to extensive woodland and don’t like fences, we have to welcome whatever animals visit, and so we don’t grow vegetables or roses, say, but it’s very frustrating when we choose some new exotic plant from the garden centre only to see it disappear within 24 hours. Occasionally, as if to mentally torture us, the visiting deer will delicately and gradually brouse something out of existence over a period of a week. On balance we much prefer to draw back the curtains in the morning and watch the deer and squirrels etc having breakfast in the garden than having nothing but a neat unvisited garden.

   Muntjac are also called the “barking deer” from the loud and startling mating calls they make. I presume this may have evolved because they are normally solitary but need to locate each other in dense vegetation when the need arises – which is often as muntjac breed at all times of year in our relatively mild maritime climate. Another attractive featureis that bthis species can be seen in daylight more frequently than other species. Because the muntjac lives in such close proximity to people and is only rarely hunted itr seems to have lost a lot of its fear of people – for a timid animal like a deer, that is.

   
   
   • on November 14, 2012 at 9:55 am massugu

     “English ivy” as we call it here in the US, is also a prime winter forage plant for the Whitetails. Since this species of ivy is a pernicious weed in our environs, thats not a problem for us. However, the deer only browse to about 5′ feet. Thus we have to go around “decapitating’ the ivy vines every winter to keep them from overrunning our trees.

     
     
3. on November 21, 2012 at 9:48 am chervilmeadow

   And yet -since ivy has been with us here since the retreat of the last ice age and so have the trees we don’t witness much of a problem overall from ivy strangulation. In our deciduous woods the dominant understorey is the evergreen prickly holly and this tends to outgun even the ivy. There is an old christmas carol which goes “Of all the trees that are in the wood the holly bears the crown” – all join in folks as the season approaches.

   
   
   • on November 21, 2012 at 10:59 am massugu

     Other than the deer feeding on the ivy for winter forage, there doesn’t seem to be any natural control here in the States. Thus, it runs rampant. We have the same problem with Japanese Honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica), Oriental Bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) and Kudzu (Pueraria lobata). This last species has been targeted by yet another pestiferous introduction, the Globular Stink Bug (Megacopta cribraria) aka the Bean Plataspid, Kudzu Bug, Kudzu Beetle, and Lablab Bug. Although its predation on Kudzu is welcomed, the huge stands of Kudzu in the southern US serve as nurseries for this insect which is also a major pest of soybeans.

     
     
4. on November 22, 2012 at 6:44 am chervilmeadow

   to be flippant, some might say that the enemy of our enemy is our friend.

   
   

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