Owls Aren't Wise and Bats Aren't Blind (41 page)

White-tailed deer are indisputably our most economically important wild mammal. As our premier big game animal, deer generate hundreds of millions of dollars in retail sales annually, and billions of dollars in overall economic impact. In addition, there is the monetary value of some 250
million
pounds of venison annually, which, at a conservative value of two dollars per pound, is worth $500 million, to say nothing of the intangible value to countless hunters and their families of putting a highly prized meat on the table through their own efforts.

Equally important is the intangible value of seeing and watching deer. Graceful, elegant, and beautiful, whitetails command the admiration and affection of large portions of our continent’s human population, who love to watch these marvelous creatures. They add immeasurably to our quality of life, and their presence serves to remind us of the values of a natural world often forgotten in the frantic pace of our daily lives. By almost any human measure, the white-tailed deer is the undisputed favorite of our North American mammals.

The origin of the whitetail’s common name is obvious to anyone who has seen the animal when it’s suspicious, nervous, or in flight. When a whitetail is unconcerned, its rather long tail points downward and is quite inconspicuous; the exposed upper side is mostly brown, with a narrow black border and just a touch of white showing at each edge.

At the first sign of danger, however, a dramatic change occurs. The tail shoots up in an erect position, revealing an all-white underside that gleams like a beacon. To make this warning signal even more impressive, the deer flares the long white hairs out to the side and wags this highly utilitarian appendage from side to side as a warning signal. When displayed in this fashion, it’s easy to understand why a white-tailed deer’s tail is called its “flag.”

In sharp contrast with its common name, the whitetail’s scientific name is something of a misnomer. Its genus name,
Odocoileus,
is probably a misspelling of
odontocoileus,
Greek for “hollow tooth.” This name is the work of an early French-American naturalist with the rather picturesque name of Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, based on a single tooth that he found in Virginia. Whitetail teeth aren’t normally hollow, and Richard Nelson, in his splendid book
Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America,
speculates that Rafinesque might have found a thoroughly atypical hollowed-out tooth of a very old deer.

Rafinesque himself is worth a small digression, for he was truly a bizarre and astonishing character, even more picturesque than his name. His brilliant intellect, which was formidable, was exceeded only by his eccentricity and arrogance. A zealous and shameless self-promoter, he made enemies even of those who greatly admired his intelligence and boundless energy. More to the point, his zeal for identifying new species sometimes led to hasty judgments that marred his otherwise admirable contributions to natural history. Such appears to have been the case with the scientific name he attached to the white-tailed deer.

The species name,
virginianus,
conferred by Rafinesque because the tooth was found in Virginia, also seems unduly provincial for a creature as far-ranging as the whitetail. However, it at least has the virtue of locating the approximate center, from north to south, of the animal’s range in North America, although subspecies of the whitetail range down through Central America to areas below the equator in South America. If any proof were needed of the whitetail’s phenomenal adaptability, this enormous distribution is it!

Unlike many other North American mammals, which originated in Asia or South America and later migrated here, white-tailed deer evidently evolved on this continent roughly 4 million years ago. Their ultimate forebears, primitive hoofed mammals, or ungulates, which deer indisputably are, date back to the Paleocene Epoch, 65 million to 55 million years ago. This was just after (in terms of the unimaginably long ticks of the geologic clock) the extinction of the dinosaurs, so our modern deer have indeed had a lengthy evolutionary journey!

The numbers of deer living in America during pre-Columbian times is a matter of considerable debate. Some estimates, based on the accounts of early explorers and settlers, run as high as 50 million. Others believe that these early accounts were exaggerated or misinterpreted, and that we now have more deer than were present before the arrival of European settlers.

Certainly the present mix of habitat—forest, brush, and fields—seems more conducive to high deer populations than the forests primeval. But those who support the high estimates believe that the enormous quantity of mast-bearing trees—oaks, chestnuts, and beeches—provided a rich enough source of autumn food to compensate for the relative lack of browse in these virgin forests.

We’ll never know for certain how many deer were here in pre-Columbian days; it’s perhaps enough to know that they were very abundant. What we do know, however, is that this bountiful resource was nearly squandered because of such things as ignorance, carelessness, and greed, and that whitetails have now rebounded to an estimated 25 million to 27 million animals.

The two most important reasons for the whitetail’s precipitous decline were habitat loss and unregulated hunting. As the forests were systematically leveled for pastures, cropland, timber, and firewood, good deer habitat became both scarce and fragmented in many parts of North America. My own state of Vermont, for instance, was 70 percent cleared just prior to the Civil War.

Deer were highly valued for their excellent meat, as well as for their hides and tallow. Unfortunately, there were no notions of modern game management principles at that time: there were no bag limits, and deer could be hunted year-round by virtually any method. Some insight into this state of affairs was given by the nineteenth-century Vermont author Rowland Robinson.

A Quaker whose home was an important station on the Underground Railroad, Robinson was also a gifted writer and painter, as well as an avid hunter and early conservationist. In one of his novels, the principal character inveighs against the practice of “crustin’.” This method of hunting consisted of waiting for a crusty snow that wouldn’t hold a deer’s weight but would sustain the weight of a man on snowshoes. A hunter merely had to locate a deer and go after it; the deer, quickly exhausted by breaking through the crust and floundering in deep snow, was easy prey for the hunter on snowshoes.

By the mid-1800s, the seemingly limitless supply of white-tailed deer in the United States had dwindled to an estimated 1 million animals, a pathetic remnant of a once-great population. Fortunately this was the whitetail’s nadir, because alarmed sportsmen conservationists began to press for measures to protect and restore this magnificent animal.

These measures took several forms. First, laws were passed in some states banning all deer hunting. Second, whitetails were live-trapped in areas where they were still present in moderate numbers, and then used to restock areas where deer were either extremely scarce or had been eliminated. Vermont again serves as an example. Deer hunting was outlawed in 1865 and remained so for thirty years. Subsequently, a number of deer were imported from New York to restock portions of the state where deer had been nearly eliminated.

As helpful as these steps were, habitat regeneration was even more important. It’s axiomatic in wildlife management circles that there can be no wildlife abundance without decent habitat, and resurgent whitetail populations proved it. Agriculture was rapidly evolving and becoming more mechanized; this meant that the roughest little hardscrabble hill farms were abandoned as farming became concentrated on the better lands. Also, sheep raising and other forms of agriculture moved westward after the Civil War, triggering more farm abandonment. Abandoned agricultural lands reverted to brush in a few short years, thereby creating prime habitat that the now-protected deer speedily filled.

One major reason for the whitetail’s rapid salvation from the brink of the abyss is its reproductive rate, which is very high for a large mammal. When deer are well nourished, many does only six months old will breed and bear a fawn the following spring. Older does generally have twins, triplets are by no means rare, and quadruplets and quintuplets have been reported on a few occasions. This reproductive potential, if unchecked by predation, can produce an astonishing number of deer in a very few years.

In one experiment, an area of roughly one thousand acres was surrounded by deer-proof fence. Biologists then used controlled hunting to cut the number of deer in this enclosure to ten. Then they stopped all hunting to see what would happen. What happened was that the ten remaining deer multiplied to 212 in only five years!

By the turn of the century, whitetail populations had rebounded to hunt-able levels in many areas of former scarcity, and strictly regulated hunting seasons were established. At this point another piece of the jigsaw puzzle of whitetail biology came into play: the mating habits of the species. This, as we shall see, had major consequences that were to prove both a blessing and a curse to wildlife managers and the deer themselves.

To understand this part of the puzzle, it’s necessary to digress and explore the nature of the male deer—the whitetail buck. First, two widely held notions about the whitetail buck need to be corrected. One is that they have horns. Wrong! Cattle, sheep, and goats have horns, but not members of the deer family. Horns are hollow, permanently attached, and grow throughout the owner’s life. Deer, on the other hand, have antlers. Composed of exceedingly hard bone, they’re shed each year during the winter, and the buck grows a replacement set.

Antler development begins in early spring. The developing antlers, starting with tiny nubs, are full of blood vessels and nerves, and have a brown covering called “velvet” because of its resemblance to the fabric. Bucks at this stage, which lasts most of the summer, are said to be “in the velvet.”

In September or October, depending on latitude, bucks rub their antlers against saplings to remove the velvet and polish them. The structure of these antlers is unique. When fully developed, they consist of a curving, approximately horizontal main beam with
single
sharp tines projecting vertically at intervals (in contrast, mule deer tines rise from the main beam and then fork). A buck’s antlers, in toto, are termed its “rack,” and the tines, including the tips of the main beams, are called “points.” Thus a buck with four points on each side is said to have an “eight-point rack,” or is simply called an “eight-pointer.”

The second long-standing misconception about deer is that a buck’s age can be determined by its rack. According to this theory, a buck grows spikes (two points) in its first year, four in its second year, six in its third, and so on. While this is more or less true under some circumstances, it’s wildly inaccurate in others.

Although older, mature bucks do tend to have larger, heavier racks than young bucks, antler development is largely a function of nutrition and genetics. Thus well-fed yearling bucks with the right genes often have six or eight points in some areas, while a poorly nourished two-year-old, or one with inferior genetics, may grow only spikes. The only accurate way to determine the age of a deer is by its teeth. For the first two years, development and replacement of teeth are a reliable indicator. Thereafter, tooth wear serves as a guide, although it becomes increasingly less accurate as the deer ages. In older deer, the only truly accurate way of assessing age is by examining a tooth’s annual growth layers under a microscope.

With the advent of autumn, the breeding season or “rut” begins. Another myth, incidentally, is that cold weather triggers the rut. Actually, biologists have learned that waning light intensity is the cause; cold weather is simply coincidental. The rut starts in late October and peaks in November in northern climes, but may be a month or more later in more southerly latitudes.

Then those assiduously polished antlers come into play, as bucks vie with each other for dominance. Nonterritorial for most of the year, bucks now try to establish hegemony over a territory that may embrace hundreds of acres. Often dominance is established simply by minor sparring matches that quickly convince younger, smaller bucks that discretion is the better part of valor. More evenly matched bucks, however, may engage in genuine battles, locking antlers and attempting to shove each other around so ferociously that the ground is torn up and shrubs trampled.

Eventually, one buck performs the whitetail equivalent of “crying uncle” and turns to flee, sometimes being pursued and gored in the process. On very rare occasions, bucks are unable to unlock their antlers; bound together like macabre Siamese twins, the two finally perish from starvation!

Now comes the piece of deer biology that has been both blessing and curse: the highly polygamous nature of whitetail bucks. Once a buck has established dominance in his territory, he proceeds to breed as many does as possible. Aware of this fact, wildlife professionals utilized it when they began to reinstate hunting seasons for rebounding deer populations. By limiting the seasons only to antlered bucks, they left the population’s doe segment untouched. Since one buck can breed many does, this allowed deer numbers to continue their climb unchecked. For many years, this was the blessing. Then came the curse.

“Buck only” seasons became the rule in most of the major deer hunting states. They worked extremely well—far
too
well in the long run. With wolves and cougars—the traditional major predators of whitetails—eliminated, humans exercised the only effective control over deer numbers. Deer populations climbed and climbed for decades. For a while, regenerating habitat kept up with this increase, but finally overpopulation began to overwhelm their food supply.

The answer, to wildlife biologists, was obvious: begin hunting female deer in order to limit the population. So one state after another began to extend hunting to deer without antlers—popularly called “doe seasons.” Thus were born what have been called “the deer wars,” bitter battles between deer hunters and wildlife biologists.