A deer is a herbivorous mammal. They are considered browsers. Deer tend to eat the tender, most nutritious parts of trees and shrubs. A delicacy for them is acorns from oak trees and the fruit from persimmons trees. Deer love to eat their dessert first. Some of the delicacies that a deer will consume in its diet are crops, twigs, green plants, berries, fruit and some fungi. They are found hanging out in meadows at times and will eat some grass, but they are usually picking out the tender broad leafed plants, like dandelions. They are ruminants, meaning cud-chewers. This digestive adaption is one of many that helps them avoid predators.
A female deer is called a ‘doe’, a baby deer is called a ‘fawn’, and a male deer is called a ‘buck’. The deer’s life span is approximately 11 to 12 years, but very few make it past 4 to 5 years old. One other factor that helps the deer’s survival is its hoofed feet. They help them to run up to speeds of 45mph. They are very fast and agile and can leap as high as 9 ft from a standing position. A deer raises its tail as a warning to the others as a sign of danger as it flees its area of comfort.
A buck can be up to four feet tall to the top of his back and weigh up to 400 pounds. The doe is much smaller. A doe can have as many as three fawns, which will stay with her until she drives them away to be on their own just prior to her next litter.
Deer are very responsive to strange smell, sounds, and movement in their area of comfort. This is the advantage of their extremely keen senses. Anything that triggers these senses in an unfamiliar fashion means ‘danger’. They are very quick to outsmart their enemies.
The deer’s eye sight is very strong and helps them to see very well at night time. This is a great advantage to them since they are nocturnal mammals. They sleep during the day and feed at night. Deer do not focus very well on solid, non-moving objects. Their sense of smell is so strong that they can smell a human up to 400 yards away. Their hearing is 10 times as strong as a human’s. These powerful senses enable them to be aware of their surroundings and respond quickly to danger.
Deer live primarily in wooded areas, although sometimes they will be seen in fields, waterways, and rural areas. It is also common to see them along the roadways now-a-days. These sightings out of the wooded areas are generally due to the fact that they are looking for food, water, or fleeing a predator. They like to sleep in areas with heavy cover from the wind and those which make it difficult for them to be seen. Their coat is generally a reddish brown and changes to more of a gray in the winter. This acts as a camouflage from predators.
The deer family are the only animals in the world that have antlers. Antlers are shed and re-grow every year. Antlers are only seen on bucks and usually branch out like tree limbs. They are made of bone with a velvety layer of skin which is shed when the antler is fully grown, leaving bare bone.
The breeding season, otherwise known as the rut, begins in the fall and runs through December, with November being the peak breeding time. During this time the buck travels a lot looking for doe. Sometimes bucks will fight over a doe using their antlers to fight.
Deer like to travel in small groups, generally consisting of a doe and her fawns or three to five bucks at a time. In the cooler weather they tend to form a herd where there may be as many as fifty to one hundred deer living together. This remains true until the rut.
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