The Hidden Life of Deer Read online

  The Hidden Life of Deer

  Lessons from the Natural World

  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

  This book is dedicated to my granddaughters, Zoë, Ariel, and Margaret; to my grandsons, David and Jasper; and to my great-grandson, Jacoby. I may have other great-grandchildren in time, and this book is dedicated to them too, but I cannot name them here because they have yet to be born. May the natural world in all its present wonder be there for them and for all children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

  Camping Alone

  My friend Antler spends weeks alone in the wilderness every fall.

  I have never spent any time camping alone, maybe two or three nights—

  once when I got lost

  and after wandering around the woods for two hours in the dark

  I just lay down and slept in the leaves.

  Antler talks about having to get used to walking on two legs again

  when he returns.

  He says that every year he leaves a little more of himself in the woods,

  and that someday there will be more of him out there than here—

  I think it may already have happened.

  Someday, maybe—I’ll go to some lonely spot and pitch my tent

  and spend my days doing what one does when alone in the woods

  and sleep night after night under the ten thousand stars.

  But not in winter. Another guy disappeared in the Adirondacks last week—

  it happens every year or two.

  But not before he froze to death.

  Solitary heart attack while temperature, snow, and night were falling.

  Howard Nelson

  Contents

  Preface: A Note to Readers

  The Year without Acorns

  Cracking the Code

  Deer Families

  The Hazards of Feeding

  Deer Seasons, Human Seasons

  Fawns

  Drivers, Hunters, and Their Prey

  Our Place in the World

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Also by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  A Note to Readers

  The notion to write this book came from feeding corn to deer in the winter in south-central New Hampshire. I didn’t know much about them except that they seemed to like corn. I wanted to know more. But they all looked alike and they wouldn’t stand still, so it took a while to fathom their behavior and really see them. I have a friend, Katy Payne, who studies elephants. It was she who discovered that elephants make infrasound, at a time when such a thing seemed impossible and no other land mammals were known to do so. Katy once told me that her advice to students who are eager to join her research team is to start by studying deer. Deer are within a mile of almost everybody, and from them one can gain an understanding of what it’s like to try to learn from wildlife. I thought of that as I watched my deer. For a while I studied wild elephants with Katy and was awed by her ability to recognize individuals. I could do that too, if not as well, but while I was trying to identify deer, it certainly seemed that elephants were easier.

  I wished that Katy could see my deer. If anyone could sort them out, she could. I started to write her a letter to describe what they were doing. Soon the letter was many pages long and I saw it was a book, this book. So I continued with what seemed to me like research, and began to realize something that I certainly should have known already, that as members of the enormous deer family with its forty-odd species, whitetails were not unlike the other deer all over the world—mule deer of the West and Southwest, red deer or elk of the Holarctic, also India, Sri Lanka, and Burma, and reindeer or caribou of the far north, to say nothing of moose, the biggest of the deer, and all the different kinds of little deer in thickets and marshes from China to Argentina. I entered a realm full of cooperation, hierarchy, and a clear set of rules. Some of these rules are specific to whitetails, but many are fundamental to all groups, not only to the deer but also to all other creatures, which would include, of course, ourselves.

  When I was a child, my father told me the chemical formulas for hemoglobin and chlorophyll, the substance in plants that makes them green and enables them to take in carbon dioxide and release our all-important oxygen. I remember the formulas to this day because they were almost identical—C55H72FeN4O6 was hemoglobin, he told me, and C55H72MgN4O6 was chlorophyll. Both had the same amounts of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, and only one difference: right in the middle where hemoglobin has iron, chlorophyll has magnesium.

  Oh wow! Young as I was, that seemed important. That a plant and a person shared something so basic seemed awesome. That plants made the oxygen in every breath we drew also seemed awesome. It gave a sense of the oneness of things. It also gave a sense of what Nature had been able to do with that formula—making so many kinds of animals and plants, all of them different. At least to me, it gave a sense of our place on the planet. I saw that animals were important. I saw that plants were even more important. I was also to learn that compared to many of the other species, we weren’t important at all except for the damage we do. We do not rule the natural world, despite our conspicuous position in it. On the contrary, it is our lifeline, and we do well to try to understand its rules.

  It is also full of wonder, and it’s right outside your door, perhaps even inside your house, even if you live in the city. You may be thinking that I’m just talking about mice and rats. And yes, I would include mice and rats. In fact, we’re related to them via our common ancestor in the Cretaceous. They live by the rules of the natural world no matter how much we discourage them, and they do so very successfully. Our species has also been very successful. The ancestral stem must have been strong.

  If we can forget our preconceptions and start fresh, observing any resident of the natural world as carefully as we can, trying to figure out what it’s doing and why, we will see things we otherwise could not imagine. We can enter a world as different from ours as it’s possible to be, the world to which we once belonged, a world we normally don’t notice but which is all around us. We can’t readily observe the burrowing insects in the soil, for instance, essential as they are to our well-being, and watching a plant until it does something perceptible can take a really long time, but we can easily observe many kinds of animals, especially birds and mammals who, because they are in ways so like ourselves, have much to show us.

  Chapter One

  The Year without Acorns

  It began with a bird feeder by the kitchen door. The chickadees chose only the sunflower hearts and threw all other seeds to the ground where three gray squirrels and a red squirrel ate them. One day the seeds were discovered by a passing flock of nine or ten wild turkeys. My husband and I were thrilled to see wild turkeys near the house. I put out a little corn for them. Soon, a flock of twenty-eight turkeys came for the corn. What should I have done? Refused to feed the others? I fed the others. By the end of that winter I was feeding fifty-three turkeys.

  We rarely saw the turkeys in the summer. They were finding food in the woods and also in our field, where long grass hid them. But they came to our house again in the fall, just the small, original flock at first, then other flocks, every morning just before dawn. Their calls would wake me, and I would bring out a pail of corn. My presence would scare them, and they would fly away. This was distressing. It takes energy to launc
h a bird the size of a turkey, and more energy if she must leap straight up into the air without first running a little way to gain momentum. The corn I offered was wasted if the turkeys had to spend their calories in unnecessary flying. I began putting the corn out at night, so it would be ready for them in the morning.

  One dark night after the first snowfall, I went out wearing a white bathrobe. I had no reason to make noise and therefore went quietly, and to my surprise I found myself right next to three deer. Because I was in white against the white snow, they didn’t pay much attention at first, and then moved off without panic, so I distributed the corn I was carrying and went back for more. After that the deer came often. Never again did they let me near them, but I watched them from the window after the moonlight returned.

  The winter of 2007–2008 was hard on wildlife in our area. The acorn crop, which fattens many animals in the fall and feeds them in the winter, was almost nonexistent. The oak trees bore nothing but a few miserable acorns that were literally smaller than peas, cup and all. A knowledgeable friend told me something very interesting, which is that nut trees do this from time to time in order to cut down on their predators. If the trees always produced a standard crop of nuts, the animals who eat them would increase in number until they reached the carrying capacity of the environment, and were eating every nut that fell. The trees would have no chance to reproduce. To handle the problem, the trees hold back and let the animals starve. The oaks held back in 2007, creating a dangerous hardship for turkeys, deer, bears, and many others.

  We are told not to feed any kind of wildlife, especially not deer. Why not? The naysayers have many reasons, the generic one being that the population of any wild species is formatted to its natural food supply, and to interfere with this is to enable more animals to live than the environment can sustain, causing the entire population to suffer from malnutrition. In other words, wild animals should starve naturally. And they do. However, the rationale is true of all living creatures, including small birds. Yet maintaining a bird feeder is laudable, and is practiced by many of those who tell you not to feed wild animals. Some species are consistent. Ours is not.

  Thus, since very few people knowingly feed invertebrates or snakes or fish or frogs, the true meaning of the don’t-feed rule is that you may feed little birds but not other birds and not mammals. Above all, you must not feed animals whose species are conspicuously successful. My mother found this out by feeding city pigeons and squirrels. She lived in Cambridge on a quiet street and put bread crumbs for birds out her kitchen window on the roof of her shed. At first, her crumbs attracted mostly English sparrows, but soon enough, pigeons and squirrels also found the food. They were just as hungry as the sparrows, and some of them, especially the squirrels, would look hopefully at my mother through the window. Regarding them as individuals in need, rather than as the collective symbol of a perceived ecological problem, she put out more food.

  Her saintly neighbors were also her friends and made no complaint (at least not to her), even though, after years of bird and squirrel feeding, the roofs of their homes were sometimes loaded with pigeons, even though the sky could almost be darkened with pigeons, even though squirrels rushed down from every fence and tree when my mother scattered crumbs from her window. Thus I did not understand the depth of animosity toward people like my mother until the day she worried that she wasn’t feeding them enough. She phoned the Audubon Society (to which she gave generous contributions) and asked how much food a city pigeon should eat. The response shocked and upset her. The rottweiler who took her call berated her so fiercely that my poised and worldly mother gasped and became a little shaky. Before this, I also had contributed to the Audubon Society, but their attack on my mother distressed me. After that, their appeals for funds evoked the needless pain they had caused a kind, caring woman. I threw away the appeals unopened, and in time, the Society stopped entreating me.

  Why are there so many pigeons? The birds we call city pigeons are also called rock doves because they once nested only on cliffs. Originally these birds were uncommon, as they were brought to the New World by early immigrants from Europe, and not many nesting sites were available. However, rock doves can eat almost anything, and with the advent of cities, they found they didn’t need cliffs after all, because they could just as well nest on the ledges of tall buildings. So, with plenty of edible trash and places to raise their young, their populations grew. Today, of course, they number in the billions, as did their close relatives, the now-extinct passenger pigeons, before we exterminated them. Do we begrudge passenger pigeons their former large numbers? Far from it. How sublime, we think, to see a migration of passenger pigeons filling the sky from horizon to horizon! If only they had not gone extinct!

  We have no such admiration for the birds we once called rock doves. They’re here in real life, not just in Audubon’s drawings, so to us they are pests. We are offended by animals who are too plentiful, and we rename them pejoratively, usually for rats, who also are considered to be too plentiful. Hence pigeons are called flying rats.

  The rules about animal feeding may vary, but my mother was steady and true. Although saddened by her Audubon attacker, she continued to feed her flocks to the best of her ability. She lived in that house for more than seventy years, and hundreds of individual birds and squirrels owed their lives to her compassion. More she couldn’t do. At the age of ninety-eight she came to live with me in New Hampshire. As we arranged her move, the prospect of leaving behind the animals who depended on her was troubling. We considered live-trapping as many of her squirrels as possible and bringing them with us but gave up the plan in the end, partly because the newcomers would only displace the local population—that, or succumb themselves—and partly because one of her saintly neighbors offered to feed squirrels for her. At any rate, we had deer and turkeys, and it gave my mother much joy to see them.

  As for interfering with nature, we have done plenty of that during our sojourn on this planet, to the detriment of nearly everything else, so like my mother, I see no reason, at this point in our history, not to offer the occasional helping hand to an animal in need, especially when the oaks decide to further their reproductive interests as they did in 2007. Near my house, I feed the oak trees too.

  I came to New Hampshire early in life, and live in a house built in 1935 by my father on land in Peterborough that we once farmed. I’ve been watching the wildlife ever since. Back in the 1930s, farming was so pervasive that there were few if any deer, but their population increased, and today they graze in our fields in spring and summer, and sleep there too, in beds they make in the grass on top of the hill. When they hear us come home in the car at night, they stand up, and we see their eyes shining.

  Although even today in southern New Hampshire it’s rare to see deer in the woods—which is something to think about, considering that they are easily the most abundant of the large North American mammals—you can see the trails they make and follow, or where they rub their foreheads on trees or make scrapes or take shelter, or eat twigs or bark in winter, or make yards in deep snow. I am astonished by their intelligence, and their intricate knowledge of their world. Sometimes a few deer will leave the woods and start across the field, only to notice something unpleasant and run back to the cover of the trees. Once hidden, they walk onward unafraid. This doesn’t seem like much until you realize that if you were standing with them in the woods, you could see everything around you and also everything in the field. You would feel fairly exposed, although to a distant observer, you would not be. How do the deer know they are hidden?

  Those of us who spend most of our time in automobiles and buildings won’t find an easy answer, and to appreciate what the deer were doing we would need to enter a woods from a field and try to figure out at which point we could no longer be seen. Only by knowing the woods very exactly would the vanishing point be apparent. Fleeing deer reenter the woods in all sorts of places, slowing down or stop
ping right after they know they have disappeared—except to an observer with high-powered binoculars. To me, this says that they have studied their world so carefully that they know all its properties. I’d say they know their territories better than many people know their houses.

  One day in the woods a doe stood up ahead of me and slipped over the ridge I was climbing. I went to the place where she had been resting, an inconspicuous dent in the ground below the branches of a hemlock tree. The place was still warm from her body, I found when I lay down there to see what she had been seeing, and I marveled at her flawless choice—she herself had been invisible under the branches, but she could see all the way down both sides of the ridge. Virtually nowhere else on that hill would this be possible, and nothing about the place was evident from a distance. You had to get into her bed to observe the perfection. Only an animal who knows every inch of her environment could have found a place as fine as that.

  The wildlife biologist Valerius Geist has said that on winter nights in the northern wilderness he has often taken advantage of the fact that deer know all the microclimates, some warmer than others. Where the deer kept warm, so could he. A swamp near our house creates a microclimate when its sun-warmed air drifts up a hillside. I learned about the microclimate from the tracks of the deer that use it in winter. Why so many tracks in this one place? Ah, yes, warm air is wafting by.

  They have even found a sheltered microclimate under the branches of south-facing oaks and pines at the edge of a field. Most trees, being dark-colored, make little pockets of warmth around the base of their trunks, so that in winter they stand in their own little snow-free spaces, but in this particular microclimate, snow melts over a much larger area. There, the overarching branches protect the ground from snowfall but are high enough to admit the rays of the low, winter sun. Also the woods behind the trees are thick enough to keep the sun-warmed air from moving quickly through them. Thus the warm air stays more or less in place. Every year, even in the coldest weather, snow often melts under those trees, so the place is surely warmer than anywhere else, and deer lie down there to rest. Still another such place is at the top of the hill we live on, in the field north of our house. The deer who sleep there are those whose eyes shine in our headlights. After the snow melts and they leave their wintering areas, they sometimes go there just after dark. On warm nights, they sleep on top of the hill where the night wind cools them. On cold nights they sleep just over the crest of the hill on the side away from the wind. Always, they lie down at a certain distance from the woods so that any bad thing must cross the open field before it reaches them. This gives them time to get up and leave. In short, they have worked out every detail of their environment, and they use it to their advantage.