The Outdoors

By Scott Rall, Outdoors Columnist

For the most part, every creature in nature is totally cute when it is born.  I do have a few exceptions, and the strongest one on my list is a baby robin.  They do not look at all cute. They are all fuzz and two huge eyes.

On the opposite end of that spectrum is the fawn of a white-tailed deer. I don’t know anyone on this planet who doesn’t agree that a deer fawn is adorable. I am seeing a less-than-normal number of fawns this early summer. I know the rains were very hard on ground-nesting birds like pheasants and prairie songbirds.

I imagine that 15 inches of rain did not do wonders for deer fawns either. Most does will have one fawn, but there are certainly more than a few sets of twins and even occasional triplets.

I tried to find this the other day and could not, but some old research I did a few years back found an interesting factoid about spots on a white-tailed deer fawn. How many spots do you think there are on a white-tailed deer fawn when it is born?  The answer I found was they averaged 210 spots. This is a lot higher than any of the guesses given by those individuals I quizzed.

The doe leaves the fawn to lie alone in the grass for much of its first month of life. It really seems odd that this creature would be left to fend for itself when they are so vulnerable. There is certainly a reason for this behavior. A fawn has almost no scent. If mom was hanging around, predators like coyotes could smell mom and then be drawn to the area the fawn was hiding in. Mom leaves the youngster alone, creating no scent which makes the fawn as safe as it could possibly be.

The young will normally start to follow mom around after about four to five weeks. They will wean off mom at about eight weeks. Fawn mortality is very high in those first few months. Approximately 40% of the fawns born this year will not reach one year of age. I will see mom and kids and two weeks later you will only see mom. The young in many cases were killed and eaten by predators or hit by cars. I have seen videos of a pack of coyotes taking down an adult deer after wearing it out over long-distance runs. A deer can attain a speed of about 40 miles per hour for short distances and can sustain a speed of 30 miles per hour for distances up to four miles.

As with just about every animal that has roamed across North America, deer were just about wiped out in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Over-hunting had reduced continental numbers to about 300,000. Today, deer populations are about what they were before European settlement. Estimates today put the white-tailed deer populations at about 30 million. The savior of the deer population was due to aggressive and loud pushback by who? You guessed it, hunters and conservationists. They pushed for controlled hunting much like we see today.

Managing deer populations is one very tricky effort. How many deer is the right number? It really depends on who you ask. Deer hunters would like to see more deer and a greater spread in age classes of deer. Meaning more older adult deer with the right mix of those year classes on down.

Car insurance companies lobby all the time to keep deer numbers reduced to cut down on deer/car collisions. How about the rancher who has 100 deer eating off of his silage pile in the wintertime? They would like a much lower number. How many deer do think there are per square mile? In Unit 213 where I live, there about 2.25 deer per square mile. Farther up north in areas not dominated by wolves, there can be more than 10-12 deer per square mile.

Wintertime, normal winters, not like the one we just had, will congregate deer in small spaces and in large numbers. If you see 100 deer in one spot in Unit 213, that is equal to all of the deer in an area equal to four miles wide and 10 miles long. It looks like a lot of deer when they are bunched up, but when all spread out in the spring, 2.25 deer per square mile is not overwhelming to most folks.

Hunting controls populations and the use of antlerless permits, killing female deer reduces reproduction and lowers populations over a few years’ time. There are about 40 million licenses issued across the continent each year. Remember that not every hunter is successful.

So, until these little ones grow up, now is one of the best times for a wildlife ride. Fawns are not overly smart and I have had them walk right up to me when walking in the tall grass. Nature is so calming. Watching wildlife soothes the soul. If you have some frustration in your day, go watch a white-tailed deer fawn. I promise you when you’re done there will be no wrinkles on your forehead and a smile on your lips.

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If you have any questions, reach out to me at scottarall@gmail.com.