I used to think deer were SUPER BORING
In truth, deer are stone-cold survivors that out-lasted the super predators!
In America, it’s the week after Thanksgiving. And in Pennsylvania, that means one thing—deer hunting season.
That might not strike much of a chord to you, depending on where you come from and your relationship with hunting, but believe me when I tell you that it’s a big deal around here. Many rural schools even give kids Monday and sometimes even Tuesday off, since so many will be donning blaze orange and traipsing off to hunting camp anyway.
But here’s the weird thing. Though I was raised to look forward to the hunt and then spend lots of time and energy pursuing these creatures, as an adult who writes about animals for a living, I realized I honestly didn’t know a whole lot about deer until I started researching them for this book!
In truth, I kinda thought deer were boring, as animals go. But what I learned about them blew my damn mind. More on that in a minute. First, some good news for you!
Because the format of my upcoming book (SORT OF FUNNY FIELD GUIDES) has changed quite a bit since I wrote the sample chapters, I now have tons of leftover material without a home. And I’m going to give it to you—for free!
Well, sort of free. As I try to build a ravenous pack of readers for this book, I’d love for you to bring a friend into the fold. Surely you know someone in your life who loves to hunt, eat, feed, photograph, or watch deer, right? So, how about you give this thing a share, and I’ll go back to spilling some tea about deer!
Deer Are Ultimate Survivors: Part 1
Deer have been around in some shape and form for at least six million years.
Scientist think the species got its start high above the Arctic Circle, when that part of the world was covered in sprawling forests of hardwood and conifer. All too soon though, the climate would cool, glaciers would solidify, and everything we now associate with deer habitat would push south. The deer, ever adaptable, moseyed on down with it.
Today, a white-tailed deer (which is the most common kind of deer in North America) might top out at around 400 pounds. This makes deer one of the largest land animals left on the continent. But through the millennia, deer have been neighbors with much more massive life forms, including ground sloths the size of oxen, mastodons with 8-foot tusks, and 1,800-pound camels. And they have survived fearsome predators, such as Smilodon, which is better known as the saber-toothed tiger, and American cave lions, which were 25 percent larger than the modern lions found in Africa and one of the largest cats to ever exist.
And then there was the short-faced bear, an extinct species of ill-tempered ursid that stood six feet tall when walking on all-fours.
A deer would have been like eating a chicken wing for such a predator, and yet, the wittle white-tails survived, thanks to an impressive array of anti-predator systems.
The eyes have it
Shine a light in a deer’s face, and you’ll notice that their eyes give off a ghoulish glow. In fact, what you’re seeing is the light bouncing off a reflective layer of tissue behind the retina known as the tapetum lucidum. This iridescent tissue doesn’t do the deer much good when it’s staring down a pair of halogen headlights on a dark road, but in the murky blue-blackness of dusk and dawn, the tapetum lucidum reflects low levels of light back through the eye’s receptors for a second time. This quirk of biology provides the deer’s eye with a double dose of whatever light is available, the effect of which is straight up night-vision.
Interestingly, deer can also see well during the day, and this might be made possible by a special ring of anti-glare pigment surrounding the corneas. Deer vision gets the best of both worlds.
As a further testament of deer eye awesomeness, I’d like you to stop reading for a moment and look to the nearest horizon. Think hard about what you see.
Without standing beside you, I know that you’re seeing one distant point in crisp detail. However, everything to the right and left are visible, but out of focus. I know, because I have human eyes, too, and they are set up to zero in on one thing at a time—a predator lurking in the underbrush, say, or a patch of blackberries hidden within a thicket.
But when a deer looks at the horizon, it sees the whole darn thing.
You know how our pupils can get bigger or smaller to adjust to the amount of light we have? Well, a deer’s pupils can draw closed into a narrow, horizontal slit. This focuses all the incoming light onto a corresponding band of the retina that is loaded up with special nerve cells and allows the deer to focus on a broad stripe of scenery. And because its eyes are situated on either side of the head, a deer can use this band to focus on 310 degrees of horizon at the same time. That’s 100 degrees more than people, by the way, and all of it in focus.
Eyes are so important for predator detection, a deer that loses one forfeits up to 180 degrees of its visual field. A lost eye is basically a death sentence, and records show that one-eyed deer rarely live very long in the wild.
Deer vision isn’t perfect, though. The animals lack the clarity and depth perception provided by human eyes, so even if they spot a predator, they’ll likely confirm whether it’s a true threat with a combination of other senses.
Vision also isn’t useful in every situation. Deer inhabit nearly every kind of habitat across their range, from mountains, deserts, and grasslands to swamps and rainforests. And many of those places are so thick with underbrush that deer can’t spot predators from a long ways off. This means that the animals must also rely on other senses beyond their sight. One of those is hearing.
Ears like radar dishes
We don’t tend to think of ears as being particularly muscular appendages, but deer ears are ripped.
Each ear is connected to a network of complex muscle groups that allows one ear to swivel independently of the other, like a pair of radar dishes. Not only does this allow a deer to scan its surroundings for the direction of a snapped twig, but by automatically detecting the difference in loudness or time it takes for the sound to arrive between the two ears, a deer can also determine how far away a noisemaker might be. This combination makes it exceedingly difficult to sneak up on the animals, unless there are other loud noises nearby—like a babbling brook or heavy rainfall.
But for as attuned as these other senses are, a deer’s sense of smell may well be its most critical. Deer sniff out predators with their noses, but the same appendage also leads them to food and helps them communicate with other deer. Smell tells a male when a female is ready to mate or when another, bigger male is lurking nearby. Smell also cements the bond between mother and fawn, without which the latter would surely not survive and the species itself would perish.
Next time: Why deer are like walking perfume factories!
Check back next week for Part 2, where we’ll discuss the aromatics of pee, secret messages written with toes, and the supersense hidden inside that funny face your cat makes.
Thanks for reading! And oh yeah, and if you’re not already a subscriber to this 100% FREE ANIMAL INFORMATION HULLABALOO, please correct that oversight immediately!