• Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Patreon
  • Premium Membership
  • Services

Natural History

by Scottie Westfall

Feeds:
Posts
Comments
« Real wildfowl
Fox squirrel being sneaky »

Meeting an Odocoileus on the trail

May 13, 2015 by SWestfall3

035

We all have that moment when we meet a deer on a path in the woods. Usually, the deer bounds off in terror, and you don’t get much a chance to examine it.

But not this doe.

She stopped before me and smelled the air, almost as if she were examining me.

To her, I am a monster. My kind can kill her kind as soon as we get a clear view of them. No other predator can kill without a chase and a grapple.

But still she stood there, smelling me. Getting nervous, a bit, but not so nervous that she bolted off. Perhaps she was taking this opportunity to see what I was about. Her gaunt frame at least suggested that she may have dropped a fawn or two nearby.

It’s a bit early for fawns, but that time is coming soon.

The coyote pups that were born last month will be weaned on regurgitated fawn meat, so the does have to be good at hiding them.

And the fawns’ instincts to lay low better be particularly strong.

Otherwise, they will become coyote chum.

But the doe had nothing to fear from me, and she just stood there. Then bolted back and stood again.

026

Then came forward again:

045

She was just finishing up her molt into the summer pelt. In winter, the deer are mousy gray. In summer, they are a rich tawny. In spring, they molt to a moth-eaten fallow.

To look upon a white-tailed deer is to see something commonplace, but it is a 3.5 million-year-old species. Her kind was on this land long before any human wandered upon it. Her kind has seen the great megafauna come and go. They once drank from rivers where Columbian and woolly mammoths bathed and ran among the many species of pronghorn and North American horses.

And even when those beasts disappeared, they were not the dominant ungulate. When Europeans came into these hills, the white-tailed deer roamed as second billing to the ubiquitous wapiti and hordes of bison. Wolves harried the herds and bands, and cougars stalked them from the thickets.

And ever since man encountered deer, he has wanted to hunt them. The first people who came into this part of the continent were expert deer hunters, but they were replaced by the Virginia and Pennsylvania frontiersmen, mostly Scots-Irish and Germans. These were followed by the small homesteaders coming west beyond the Alleghenies. Later, they saw the wars between the Europeans and the indigenous peoples and then wars between the Europeans.

Later still, they saw the scores of Virginia and Maryland slaves being marched in chains to the Ohio River, where they would be put on barges and sent down the river into the Mississippi Delta cotton plantation hellholes.

They saw the blue-clad soldiers defeat the ones in gray, and they saw the great forests fall in the name of progress and improvement and simple profit. They saw the land open for the coal mines and oil wells, and great fortunes were made then.

And then they very nearly disappeared from the land as the mammoths and elk had done before them. Only in the remotest of redoubts in the High Alleghenies did the Odocoileus hold on.

But wiser men saved the deer. They closed seasons on hunting them, banned hunters from using dogs to chase them, and made the sell of their meat a crime.

And the deer came back.

By the end of the twentieth century, there were far more white-tailed deer in North America than in 1492.

They have withstood the transformation of North America into the New Europe in a way that no other hoofed beast has.

They have thrived in the lands left feral as the family farm has been abandoned, but they have also thrived in the corn and soy bean fields of the Midwest. They do quite well in the suburbs and in towns of varying sizes.

We’ve unwittingly made this continent a great place to be a white-tailed deer. We’ve removed most of their competition and almost all of their major predators.

They thrive not in spite of us. They thrive because of us.

Yet this doe knew fully well that I could just as easily mean danger for her. Her kind has no concept of ecology or natural history or of even the slightest philosophy. She doesn’t know that her kind’s explosion onto the landscape is the result of my kind’s bumbling attempts to civilize and cultivate this New Europe.

We stared at each other across that bridge between two species, and when she decided that she didn’t want to press her luck anymore, she bounded off to the nearest thicket.

The Odocoileus exists outside of me. We can never be comrades. She is connected to the land, the oaks and their acorns, and the months of sun and the months of snow in a way that I will never be.

My kind has cast itself away from those forces. My food comes from a store, and it grew or was fattened in another state, where the law of Ricardo says there is better than to grow crops or fatten stock.

But she is so natural, so sleek, so pleasing. The millions of years of evolution have crafted her so finely that she looks she was made just to stand in the forest and look elegant.

By contrast, this melanin-deficient African ape monster looks so out of place. Perhaps aliens put me here.

I can only hope to be as one with the forest as she is, and to see her in her oneness is to see something so beautiful and beguiling.

It is a call back to the time when my kind lived off hers, a time when my species was still very much a part of it all.

It was a savage, brutal time, but it was a time when we didn’t have the luxury of deluding ourselves that nature is only what we pass by in the car.

She knows the savagery and the brutality, and fleetness of foot and keenness of ears and nose serve her well.

Intellect and ingenuity gave my species dominance, but it may prove to be our undoing.

And maybe if the Odecoileus knew about what my species really could do, she wouldn’t have stood there so cavalierly in the open.

I know that if I were a deer, I wouldn’t be there for long.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Print
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Posted in wildlife | Tagged deer, doe, white-tailed deer | 6 Comments

6 Responses

  1. on May 13, 2015 at 9:16 pm judie lewellen

    l


  2. on May 13, 2015 at 9:18 pm judie lewellen

    Beautifully written, Scottie. Next step The New Yorker.


    • on May 14, 2015 at 7:17 pm retrieverman

      Thank you.

      If only I knew how to get that far :)


  3. on May 14, 2015 at 7:38 am puller9

    A lovely article sent to me by a friend. Man’s arrogance is what will be our undoing. I, for one, shall remain one, with Odocoileus Virginianus and their companions of the forest and field.


  4. on May 14, 2015 at 7:36 pm samivy

    What a nice article.
    Judging from the photos it looks as though instinct is telling it to run, perhaps it could sense you’re not a threat, which would explain why it lingered. Or maybe she just wanted to make sure you weren’t following her.

    Regards
    Sam Ivy


  5. on May 15, 2015 at 9:55 pm YRYDYCE

    Just beautifully written !



Comments are closed.

  • Like on Facebook

    The Retriever, Dog, and Wildlife Blog

    Promote Your Page Too
  • Blog Stats

    • 9,592,073 hits
  • Retrieverman’s Twitter

    • @TetZoo That was the proto QAnon conspiracy theory. Wow. America is sending out lots of toxic slime conspiracy theo… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 4 days ago
    • @cyborgsuzy Sounds like it would work. In theory.... 1 week ago
    • 2 people followed me // automatically checked by fllwrs.com 1 week ago
    • one person unfollowed me // automatically checked by fllwrs.com 1 week ago
    • 2 people followed me and one person unfollowed me // automatically checked by fllwrs.com 2 weeks ago
  • Google rank

    Check Google Page Rank
  • Archives

    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019
    • August 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • May 2019
    • April 2019
    • March 2019
    • February 2019
    • January 2019
    • December 2018
    • November 2018
    • October 2018
    • September 2018
    • August 2018
    • July 2018
    • June 2018
    • May 2018
    • April 2018
    • March 2018
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
    • December 2017
    • November 2017
    • October 2017
    • September 2017
    • August 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • May 2017
    • April 2017
    • March 2017
    • February 2017
    • January 2017
    • December 2016
    • November 2016
    • October 2016
    • September 2016
    • August 2016
    • July 2016
    • June 2016
    • May 2016
    • April 2016
    • March 2016
    • February 2016
    • January 2016
    • December 2015
    • November 2015
    • October 2015
    • September 2015
    • August 2015
    • July 2015
    • June 2015
    • May 2015
    • April 2015
    • March 2015
    • February 2015
    • January 2015
    • December 2014
    • November 2014
    • October 2014
    • September 2014
    • August 2014
    • July 2014
    • June 2014
    • May 2014
    • April 2014
    • March 2014
    • February 2014
    • January 2014
    • December 2013
    • November 2013
    • October 2013
    • September 2013
    • August 2013
    • July 2013
    • June 2013
    • May 2013
    • April 2013
    • March 2013
    • February 2013
    • January 2013
    • December 2012
    • November 2012
    • October 2012
    • September 2012
    • August 2012
    • July 2012
    • June 2012
    • May 2012
    • April 2012
    • March 2012
    • February 2012
    • January 2012
    • December 2011
    • November 2011
    • October 2011
    • September 2011
    • August 2011
    • July 2011
    • June 2011
    • May 2011
    • April 2011
    • March 2011
    • February 2011
    • January 2011
    • December 2010
    • November 2010
    • October 2010
    • September 2010
    • August 2010
    • July 2010
    • June 2010
    • May 2010
    • April 2010
    • March 2010
    • February 2010
    • January 2010
    • December 2009
    • November 2009
    • October 2009
    • September 2009
    • August 2009
    • July 2009
    • June 2009
    • May 2009
    • April 2009
    • March 2009
    • February 2009
    • January 2009
    • December 2008
    • November 2008
    • October 2008
    • September 2008
    • August 2008
    • July 2008
  • Recent Comments

    markgelbart on Retiring this Space
    oneforestfragment on Retiring this Space
    The Evolving Natural… on So does the maned wolf break t…
    SWestfall3 on So does the maned wolf break t…
    Ole Possum on So does the maned wolf break t…
  • Meta

    • Register
    • Log in
    • Entries feed
    • Comments feed
    • WordPress.com
  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,703 other followers

  • Pages

    • About
    • Contact
    • Patreon
    • Premium Membership
    • Services
  • Subscribe to Retrieverman's Weblog by Email
  • Revolver map

    Map

  • Top Posts

    • The Alaskan Noble Companion Dog
  • SiteCounter

    wordpress analytics
    View My Stats
  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,703 other followers

  • Donate to this blog

  • Top 50 Northwest Dog Blogs

    top 50 dog blogs

Blog at WordPress.com.

WPThemes.


Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×
    loading Cancel
    Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
    Email check failed, please try again
    Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
    %d bloggers like this: