White tails

In the course of the excursion noticed at reference 1, I came across the book at reference 2, a second hand copy of which has now turned up from the US - arriving in a sort of sturdy brown wrapper not used in this country. Might have been heat sealed in the way of the kipper wrappers one gets from Waitrose.

A nicely produced, hardback book, something more than a hundred pages of it, complete with dust jacket and a large number of black and white pictures. A nature book of the better class, nicely written by a chap who seems to have spent a lifetime with these deer. And, by way of a bonus, inside the front cover I get a deer hunting permit from British Columbia on the left and a scrawled hunting record on the right. Curiously, the record running from 1930 to 1946, in a book which dates from 1962 or so.

It turns out that these white tailed deer are interesting animals, named for the conspicuous white flash under the tail which the female displays for the benefit of her following fawns. Maybe for other purposes too.

Their preferred browse (a good word, new to me) is the leaves and shoots of the right sort of young trees, which means they do well on land where the primary forest has been cleared and the secondary forest is springing into life - with there being a great deal of land of this sort in the US, with numbers of these deer probably larger now, with there being millions of them, than they were before us white folk arrived from Europe.

Very large numbers die of starvation during the winter. Large numbers are lost to road-kill and hunting - both fatal to the deer and the former doing serious damage to the cars. Smaller numbers lost to predation - with all kinds of predators taking these deer, from large cats (bobcats and others) to golden eagles. Domestic dogs do the most damage, rather as domestic cats do the most damage to small birds, here in Epsom. That said, a healthy adult deer is well able to defend him or herself, able to do terrible things with their front hooves, despite only standing three to four feet high. They will also kill rattlesnakes by jumping up and down on them. But they are pretty much helpless if they get into deep snow or onto ice. And some are lost to natural accidents, like getting stuck in a bog or getting antlers stuck in the fork of a tree.

They are a major pest to foresters and farmers, doing a huge amount of damage to crops. On the other hand, they are also a major industry, with large numbers of people either looking at them - they are very pretty - or shooting at them. With spin-offs such as that snapped above. So something of a conundrum for the animal rights people.

Of interest to me because they have very well developed senses of sight, smell and hearing, making them difficult to approach. They can, it seems, smell an upwind human as far away as 500 yards.

On the other hand, they are colour blind and are thought to see the world in shades of gray. Perhaps this helps with seeing at night. They are not bothered by the garish colours often sported by hunters. They are not bothered by things which do not move. But they are very sensitive to movement and we are told that the blinking of an eye can be enough to send them off into safety.

A regular cornucopia. A good find.

PS: perhaps mice don't pay attention to things that don't move either. Think of how still a cat will sit, waiting outside a mousehole.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/a-nasal-curiosity.html.

Reference 2: The World of the White-Tailed Deer - Leonard Lee Rue III – 1962.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_deer.