Doe and “button buck” captured on the trail cam.
The white-tailed deer is a common creature. Virtually everyone in North America has seen one.
This has been the first year I’ve taking trail-camming deer seriously, and I’ve been impressed at what has been revealed to me.
As animals go, they are pretty common, but their lives are mysteries to us. They spend so much time in thickets and then are only seen during the dusk and dawn hours.
They don’t form vast herds the way that red and fallow deer do in Europe.
They live out their lives in bands. Related does run together all year round, and the bucks form all male bands that suddenly dissipate once the hormones start flowing at beginning of November.
And these common animals still remain mysterious.
Most people are unaware that the white-tail is the oldest living deer species. It may even be the oldest ungulate species still living in the Americas. Their fossils have been dated to the Pliocene, some 3.5 million years ago!
They were here long before there were wolves and cougars to hunt them and far longer before the first human ever killed one.
It was almost killed off in that orgy of market hunting that spread through the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Now, our forests are being shaped by the multitudes of deer that have rebounded and surpassed their Pre-Columbian population levels.
We slam into them with our cars. (One took out my headlight a few weeks ago!) We build Berlin walls around our gardens and vegetable patches to keep them out.
And yet they survive.
As they always have.
We killed off the wolves and cougars, and bobcats and coyotes offer them only token predation.
They live almost without fear, save for the few who sling arrows or blast guns at them.
We can only hope that our kind proves as resilient as the white-tail.
We are the foreigners here.
They are the natives.
The whitetail even made the cover of Time magazine this week.
Nice one Scottie. Though I must say that their social structure seems to be changing as their numbers increase. Its not uncommon to see winter “herds” of 2 dozen or more.
Thanks retrieverman, I find your blogs are educational in themselves and prompt the reader towards exploring the subjects you cover for themselves via the internet.
Incidentally, although it seems the whitetails are, as you say, the oldest existing deer their ancestors go back only (only?) 3.4 – 5.2 million yrs whereas the ancestors of muntjacs, for example, go back 22 – 42 million yrs.
Talking of which, when I was a young man in the early sixties there were hardly any muntjacs in Britain, just some escapees from the Duke of Bedford’s park, but now we have millions and they are even moving into Scotland hundreds of miles to the north. They are having a disastrous effect on woodland undergrowth and the animals which live amongst it. But control is going to be problematic as few people are interested in shooting deer, plus rifles and shotguns are not widely held as they are in America.
The majority of the 40 thousand plus deer killed here each year are road fatalities (along with a few of the drivers and passengers). Much of England’s woodlands are open and cris-crossed by footpaths and those who walk them would be in danger from those shooting deer for whatever reason. However, something needs to be done specifically to control muntjac safely and humanely.
The ancestors of Muntjacs go back deeper, but the actual species of white-tailed deer is older than the existing species of Muntjacs.
If anyone were to be in doubt about the effect of an imbalnace of deer they would only need to visit the Isle of Wight, a largeish island off our south coast, where no deer exist and the ground flora is abundant as it should be on the mainland but isn’t.
Hi Chervilmeadow,
Put the foxhunters to use with a new sport, cowboy roundups of deer. Polo ponies would be better than jumpers or hunter horses, because turning is everything – longer leg horses would be too likely to be injured unless their riders were restrained and careful.
Let the polo players have this as a second sport too, if they wanted.
The deer could be chased into a wide open fenced area that taped in the rear, where human hunters could reduces their numbers safely.
LOL, May. Sounds fun, but there are maybe a few problems with your suggestion. Firstly, hunting with dogs is illegal in Britain, secondly, muntjac with their small slim shape slightly head down tendency and tiny backward facing unbranched antlers, are perfectly evolved for movement through asian jungles, and therefore by pure chance are also superbly equipped for squeezing through narrow gaps in Britain’s ubiquitous linear forests, otherwise know as the hedgerows which have surrounded most of our fields ever since the enclosures act was introduced back in the day.
If that wasn’t enough, this is impoverished Britain 2013 and so we couldn’t muster enough polo ponies even for an experimental trial. So your plan B would is…? Meanwhile, muntjacs rule in the English countryside – and as I draw back the curtains in the morning there they are, eating the last rose bush. Actually I love them to bits except…