I went out very early this morning without the dog to see what I might be able to photograph.
I startled this pair of white-tailed deer that were browsing at the edge of the woods.
The larger and tawnier of the two is a mature doe. She’s not at all impressed with my presence, which is why she standing so erect.
The smaller of the pair is a young buck. He’s likely her last year’s fawn that hasn’t yet moved on in the world. White-tailed deer can be real “mama’s boys” will sometimes stay with their mothers for a significant length of time before they join an all-male band.
The mature bucks stay in bands of three or four deer all summer, but as the rutting season begins, they start to fight each other and disperse to spend about a month or two living like cervine tom cats.
If you look really closely, you can see the little antlers budding from the young buck’s head.
He might be a four-point in October. I can see some branching the buds, but it’s very hard to tell at this stage.
These deer are heavily hunted, and they need to be.
Without regular hunting pressure, their numbers really do build up, and they actually will destroy the forests in which they live. In the worst part of the winter, they will pluck virtually every low hanging branch they can find.
In West Virginia, this is the big game animal. The whole state shuts down for the opening week of modern firearms season. In most counties, you can kill bucks or does during this week.
Lots of people use these deer as their primary source of protein. They either poach them or get the meat donated by hunters who don’t like the meat. My grandpa used to give deer away to a guy he called “Joe the Plumber” (who was not actually a plumber and was not anything like the real “Joe the Plumber.”) He was a convicted felon and on a fixed income, and as a felon, he couldn’t carry a gun or hunt. So my grandpa took pity on him and gave him every deer he shot.
My European readers might remark on how much these deer look like roe deer. That’s an astute observation. White-tailed deer and their cousins, the mule and black-tailed deer, are pretty closely related to roe deer.
However, white-tailed deer are quite a bit larger. These particular ones weigh about as much as a fallow deer, and the largest of this species approach the size of a red deer.
I think they are one of the most beautiful species of North American wildlife. I think that only the pronghorn is a more beautiful animal.
They are at their most attractive when they are in their tawny summer pelts.
When winter comes, they will all be a mousy gray color and thus will be almost impossible to see when they stand against the trunks of the trees.
this story was most informative and enjoyable, I wish I knew more about thee beautiful animals.
I do distance running and was running through the woods with a running group when a mother deer and her adolescent offspring came running across the path. The mother got across the path but the baby who was on course to hit right into me thankfully veered to the left just before knocking me down. I had to wait for the other runners to run past to then scoot the baby over to where the mother had run. They are big beautiful deer the white tail. We have hunting once a year to regulate the numbers since we are so densely populated with people and there are no more wolves left here to do mother nature’s work of population control.
I have had many encounters with our white tailed deer all over the eastern USA and Canada.
My 10 year old son had a distinction of being attacked by one during our hike through one of the trails in Shenandoah National Park.
What i have noticed is that the deer change their colour too. They are much more darker in winters.
They are cute, but I don’t mind their being hunted by men and women. I do mind de-listing gray wolves from the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
This was an informative post.
I also don’t particularly care for the wolf delisting.
[…] This is where I first found the two deer from today’s the earlier post. […]
We have Mules here in Eastern Washington state, not hunted nearly as much as they should be since there are so many “aren’t they cute” types. Guess those folks will learn the hard way the herds need t be thinned. Our males are much smaller than they should be, too, because of this. Gets tiresome seeing them running around town all the time, and at least once a year one gets hit by traffic. Even though it’s a very small town here, it’s bisected by two state highways. Though I think they are beautiful, I’m still in favor of thinning them out to keep them from suffering. We can have massive wildfires in the summer that burn their food crops, and our winters aren’t harsh enough to thin them.
You state needs to allow deer hunting by using dogs and men together, but not by bow-hunting :-)
They do all of that, but deer season only lasts a couple of weeks, not long enough to do any good.