Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
the woman termed “slash” actually consisted of a few slender saplings that had been bent over by the
winter's snow.
This woman was far from stupid. In fact, I was quite impressed with the knowledge that she had
acquired in a short time concerning deer in the locality. She had invested considerable time and effort
tracing their trails to see when and where they moved through the area, and had learned much about
their movements. Nevertheless, she had no frame of reference by which to judge either the logging job
or the strength of a deer's legs.
Although she meant well, her fear that deer would “break their delicate legs” in almost nonexistent
slash was wildly misplaced. Anyone who has seen much of deer in the wild knows better. I've wit-
nessed deer bounding at high speed with perfect safety and apparent ease through logging slash so thick
and deep that a person could barely clamber over and crawl through it. Likewise, I've seen whitetails
racing up, down, and sideways at top speed along steep, rocky hillsides where a person could barely
navigate.
In sharp contrast with the notion of deer as delicate creatures, I was presented with a graphic demon-
stration of their astonishing toughness and durability. While driving one day, I suddenly saw three does
running over a rise to my left, and I had to brake sharply when they leaped across the road just in front
of me. As I watched them bound down the bank to my left and across an open pasture to the woods
beyond, a fourth doe suddenly flashed across the highway, following the route of the first three.
Near the base of the slope on the left stood the remnants of an old fence, a single strand of barbed
wire still firmly attached near the top of a line of weathered cedar fenceposts. As the doe fled down the
embankment, she turned her head to look back at me.
When she snapped her head forward again, the wire caught her under the chin in mid-leap. The result
was quite astonishing: held by the chin, the doe swung like a pendulum so that she was upside down,
head pointed back toward me.
The next instant, as the full force of her momentum took hold, the wire slid over her chin and she
went rocketing through the air, bottomside up, to land on her back with a horrendous impact many feet
away. The thought had no sooner flashed through my mind that this was one very dead deer when she
whirled to her feet and galloped off into the woods, unscathed. So much for the fragility of the white-
tailed deer!
Winter in northern portions of the whitetail's range is the time of maximum stress, when only the
fittest may survive the combination of deep snow and bone-chilling cold. Despite the rigors of this sea-
son, however, deer are by no means defenseless against its perils. For starters, abundant autumn feed in
good habitat allows the deer to put on a layer of dense, tallowy fat. The energy stored in this fat is a re-
serve that can be drawn on during the long, cold months, and may be crucial to survival in an especially
severe winter.
Wildlife biologists realized this many years ago, and also learned that the very last of the fat reserves
to be depleted are those in the marrow of the large bones. This led to a very quick, simple test to de-
