(Chelsea Update would like to thank Tom Hodgson and the Waterloo Natural History Association for the information and photos in this column. This is the second part of a series of columns on deer. For part 1, click here.)
A luxury car usually comes with a lot of bells and whistles that provide many creature comforts and exciting experiences for the occupants. If there was a model called a white-tail, it would have to be a luxury car, a sports car and an ORV rolled into one.
Deer can go from a dead stop to 30 m.p.h. in seconds and leap a 10-foot fence or jump over a 30-foot wide stream with ease. Their thin reddish summer coats allow them to shed heat keeping them cool, while their dark winter coats with hollow guard hairs keep them warm in the coldest weather. The dark color even aids in adsorbing heat on sunny days.
Some luxury cars are equipped with radar to warn drivers of dangerous situations. Deer have sensory warning systems as well. Their keen sense of smell, will quickly detect any potential predators that might be up wind. Their acute hearing and swivel ears allow them to monitor sounds coming from any direction. Their eyes are mounted on the sides of their heads and are like wide-angle lenses, giving them a 300-degree field of vision, or five-sixths of a complete circle without moving their heads. Everything in that broad field of vision is in focus at once.
For years deer were thought to be totally color-blind, but recent studies have shown they can see two of the three primary colors. They cannot see the red end of the light spectrum however, which allows hunters to wear the safety orange colors without being detected. Because their eyes are mounted on the sides of the head, their range of binocular vision is very small, which makes it difficult for them to pick out individual, stationary objects. Therefore, a hunter in plain view may go undetected as long as he or she is down wind and remains absolutely still.
Their night vision is exceptional, about 50 times better than ours. Each eye has a special reflective layer that bounces the incoming light back to the retina a second time allowing them to effectively double the illumination. It is this reflective layer that makes their eyes shine so brightly in our headlights at night.
Some luxury cars have hands-free cell phone use allowing drivers to communicate with family and friends without taking hands off the wheel. Deer are continually sending messages with every step they take. Scent glands between the toes leave information including the sex, health and readiness for mating of the track maker. In addition to individual tracks, during the rut, bucks will create “scrapes” by pawing the ground and creating a bare patch and then often urinating on the spot.
Hunters will often set up near scrapes in hopes of bagging a big buck. Unfortunately for the hunter, these scrapes are primarily visited at night.
During the rut, bucks will rub their antlers against the trunks of small trees and shrubs, initially to remove the velvet skin from the antlers after they are hardened, but also to scent mark. There are also scent glands located on the forehead of the buck between the antlers that come in contact with the tree and shrub stems during the rubbing process and deposit scent messages for other bucks and does. A buck that has been doing a lot of rubbing often looks to have had a really bad hair day as the area between the antlers appears rather messy. Deer have scent glands on seven locations on their bodies. The functions of some are still not fully understood.
More about white tails next Sunday.
