The Hidden Life of Deer Read online

  Deer can hide extremely well. A faint, quick movement such as the flick of an ear in the bushes is the kind of clue that good hunters look for. Deer know this and are able to stay absolutely motionless for hours. If the deer who enter the woods from my field were any example—the deer who knew at exactly what point they become invisible to an observer—they are excellent judges of cover, and may hide standing up or lying down, depending upon what is shielding them from a potential viewer. It must take nerve not to panic and run while a hunter creeps toward you. But even then they stay perfectly still. Dr. Rue shows a photo of a whitetail in a snowy field hiding behind a tuft of dry grass and saplings.[2] Lying down with his head low, his tail folded to conceal the white, his impressive eight-point antlers almost invisible among the tuft of plants that hides him, he looks like dry grass, and even in the photo with a caption that says what one is supposed to be seeing, one can scarcely find him. His antlers blend with the branches above him, as both have the same thickness and kind of curve, and his coat color blends with the dry grass. As long as he didn’t move, he would be invisible. A deer such as he must know exactly what he is doing, including what he looks like, to be able to choose such effective camouflage. Perhaps the deer who hide remember their time as speckled fawns, curled up in the shadows of ferns.

  Dr. Rue tells of experimental hunts[3] conducted by several different states in fenced areas perhaps a mile square in which a number of bucks are imprisoned. Biologists in observation towers watch what these bucks do while hunters try to kill them. To learn how these deer manage to escape—information of great value to hunters—is essentially the purpose of the experiments. But if hunting imprisoned deer might seem easy, it is not. Dr. Rue tells of an experiment conducted at the Cusino Wildlife Experiment Station in Michigan. Six experienced hunters hunted for four days before any of them even saw a buck. Not until the fifth day did a hunter manage to kill one.

  These deer knew they were being hunted, especially when they saw the hunters sneaking around, and they knew they could not leave the area because of the fence. According to Dr. Rue, some “crawled into thickets or under blowdowns, or got behind or under cover that looked too skimpy to conceal a deer.”[4] There, they stayed perfectly still while the hunters walked past them. Some stayed in hiding for a day at a time, just as they might have done when they were fawns. Others would move after a hunter had gone by, perhaps to find a place that seemed safer. In the Michigan experiment, the ground was covered with snow, so the deer who moved left tracks that the hunters could follow. And yet they escaped, because they knew about their tracks and would circle around to watch their own trails to see if anyone was following them.

  The account doesn’t say if any deer survive these hunts. I’ll bet they didn’t. After all, the idea was not to see if any deer survived, but to see how long it would take the hunters to kill all of them. Wildlife experiments being what they are, the deer were probably doomed from the start.

  But they wanted to live. I know that from deer-feeding.

  Chapter Eight

  Our Place in the World

  Everything wants to live. Everything wants offspring that live. This book is about deer, but watching them inevitably, sometimes serendipitously, led me to a few of the many lessons available from the millions of life-forms who share the ownership of my land. They own it by rules established by their species, just as my ownership is established by a document in the Hillsborough County Registry of Deeds. The bobcat on the slopes of North Pack stakes his boundaries with scats in important locations. A black walnut tree planted in the woods by my father oozed out a toxin to keep other plants from growing nearby and made for itself a little clearing of its own. The tree didn’t live, but I successfully use its strategy—my land is posted. Of all the lessons I have learned from the natural world, the most compelling is this: thousands of different kinds of us are here, doing what we must to meet our basic needs. Our methods are different, but our object is the same.

  So I try to keep my eyes open for my co-owners. Often I fail to note them because I’m too focused, either because I’m looking for deer or am thinking about them. The great naturalist Olaus Murie had something to say about this mind-set: “Perhaps it is better not to specialize too much,” he wrote. “The bird enthusiast can add to his enjoyment and understanding by some interest and skill in reading the record of mammals. The naturalist goes forth to enjoy what he can find, be it bird, mammal, insect, plant, or the music of a mountain stream.”[1] This, of course, is how Murie acquired his phenomenal knowledge of the natural world and, like the Kalahari hunter-gatherers, could recognize everything he saw and understand everything that was happening around him as clearly as the rest of us can understand a nature film with its predigested information carefully explained. Not only could Murie recognize the tracks and scats of every mammal in America, but he also knew the scats of different kinds of snakes, to say nothing of their tracks, and could tell the difference between the tracks of a bullfrog and a leopard frog or the scats of a sage grouse, a ruffed grouse, and a spruce grouse. Trust me, there’s very little difference. He could even tell the difference between the tracks of a cricket (a Mormon cricket—he wouldn’t just call it a cricket) and a grasshopper. Imagine the world that was open to Olaus Murie.

  So I try to see more, to be a better observer—less like Liz Thomas and more like Olaus Murie. Sometimes I manage to do that, at least to a degree. Anyone can manage some kind of observation, and if you try, a cornucopia will open and one surprise after another will spill out at you, often as an unexpected by-product of some other effort. You just need to be ready.

  But you will not be ready if you cling to the notion that our species is basically different from the rest. We’re not, except that we’re more destructive. One of the greatest barriers we have to understanding the life-forms around us is the burden of misinformation we carry in our heads. As it was with the residual farm lore that left me with many a misimpression, so we are often told that if humans have a certain characteristic, then by definition, an animal cannot. For a while, even certain scientists appeared to hold this view, or so it seemed when questions of anthropomorphism arose. In part because of the extreme caution of the scientists, fear of acknowledging shared characteristics has leaked out and is now in the general public to the degree that an editor at the New York Review of Books—surely a highly educated person—challenged my use of the term “naked” for an infant macaque monkey who was born, as are all macaques, with hair so fine and sparse as to be almost invisible. ”Is it unusual for a rhesus monkey to be naked?” he asked sarcastically. ”Do they usually wear clothes?” He seemed unaware that the dictionary allows my use of “naked,” but what can one do? I withdrew the piece I had written. When my friend the writer Sy Montgomery referred to a female crane who had just laid an egg as “she,” her editor struck out “she” and wrote “it.” To attribute gender to a crane was anthropomorphizing. I’ve had similar difficulties with editors who, for instance, didn’t like my use of the word want when speaking of what plants want, even though some human wants—those inspired by glandular information, perhaps—may be as hardwired as those of any plant. Nor did some editors like the use of “who” and “whom” for nonhuman species. I don’t tolerate such ideology, and neither did Sy. I’ve used “who” and “whom” for trees. But these editors were only doing what they thought was right—victims of vastly misplaced political correctness that far too many people carry. So it’s best to get away from that. A good way to look at other life-forms is to view them all as something like yourself.

  Consider Cordyceps, for example, a simple fungus you might pass without noticing. When an insect crawls over it, it will attach itself to the insect’s carapace and excrete a chemical to burn a hole. It then will enter the insect through the hole and begin to eat its nonvital organs. To protect the insect until the Cordyceps has finished with it, the Cordyceps will excrete an antibiotic against bacterial inf
ection, also a fungicide against fungal infection, and also an insecticide against attack by other insects. After eating the nonvital organs, the Cordyceps will eat part of the insect’s brain. Somehow, this will cause the insect to climb a tree and fasten itself to the top. When the insect has secured itself, Cordyceps will eat the rest of the brain. Then the insect will die, and the Cordyceps will split open the corpse and release its spores into the wind. What is all this for? The fungus wants its spores to travel far and wide, improving their chances of survival. This would not happen if they were released on the ground if the parent couldn’t get up into the wind.[2] Thus the parent Cordyceps does its best by its offspring. We do that too, if not the same way. We are all the children of Gaia.

  Thus a useful way to look at another life-form is to assume that whatever it may be doing—chewing bark, digging a tiny hole, wrapping itself in a leaf, sending up a sprout, turning its leaves to face the sunlight—it is trying to achieve a goal that you, in your way, would also want to achieve. In fact, you can be sure of that. The closer you are taxonomically to what you are looking at, the more likely you are to recognize what its goals might be, and the further you are, the less likely. Either way, it’s fascinating.

  For instance, I came home one afternoon in August and saw a group of four deer in the field across the road, but they were just entering the woods, and I couldn’t identify them. If I had been there when they were in the field, I could at least have determined whether I knew them or not. I walked around for a while to see if I could learn more but I didn’t. However, as I was leaving I saw an enormous green caterpillar, almost five inches long, coming out of the bushes on the east side of a path. He looked very much like a tomato hornworm, but I didn’t think he was. His proportions seemed different and I knew of no tomato plants for miles around. But I am not an entomologist by any stretch of the imagination. I could only wonder and watch. Once across the path, he selected a very thin sapling about three feet tall and started to climb it, clasping the stalk with his pseudopodia, moving the rear one first, then the next and the next, finally grasping with his six true legs—the insect legs on his first segment—just as his rear pseudopod clasped the stalk for a second time. Up and up he climbed, all the way to the top. Once there, however, he found the plant not to his liking. He came down again and, continuing on his line of travel, he went in among the bushes to the west.

  I was stunned. Almost exactly a year earlier I had seen exactly the same thing—the same kind of caterpillar crossing the same path at almost the same place, and climbing a small plant, perhaps even the same plant, only to abandon it in almost exactly the same way and keep traveling. I felt fairly sure that despite their astonishing similarities, these were two individuals, not the same caterpillar, although certain insects do remain in their larval state for years, including certain butterflies and moths. But I couldn’t believe that many of them do this in New Hampshire, or not aboveground, especially if they are large and soft with naked skin. It’s true that the little wooly bear caterpillars survive while frozen solid, but they are specially equipped for this with exceptional metabolisms. So it seemed to me that by the time I saw the second caterpillar, the first must have turned into a moth and surely was no longer living. But if that were so, what explained the almost precise repetition?

  I had no idea, of course, although a few things seemed likely. I didn’t think the caterpillars were looking for food because they would have been able to recognize the plant’s species from afar. Also they passed by leaves on the way up and weren’t interested in them. So perhaps they were looking for a place to pupate, chose a thin plant because they could grasp it with their pseudopodia, then found when they reached the top that it was too short and went to look elsewhere. At any rate it was a splendid example of a living creature, or two living creatures, struggling to meet their own needs, which surely were important. The second caterpillar—the one I saw after looking for deer information that August afternoon—had been in a hurry, perhaps almost in a desperate hurry, and had walked quickly. I couldn’t remember if the first caterpillar, a year earlier, had been in a hurry too. But I felt sure, without a doubt, that something major had been happening in both their lives.

  Most experiences of wildlife viewing are mixtures. Often you can understand a part of what you see, but not all of it. At the time of this writing my four-year-old grandson, Jasper, lives with his parents in a house across the road. He is most helpful in learning the surroundings, because every evening at his suggestion we go out to look for—as he puts it—“something interesting.” His eyes are closer to the ground than mine, and his eyesight is better. He also looks up into many plants rather than down on them, and notes all manner of things that a taller passerby would never see. He points them out, and we try to interpret what we’re looking at with variable success. One day we found a solitary milkweed surrounded by long grass and goldenrod. That in itself was unusual, as milkweeds normally occur in groves. Jasper knows many plants by name, and is much taken by milkweed with its milk and fluffy seeds, so he examined this one carefully and saw a monarch caterpillar on the underside of a leaf.

  Oh wow! We were excited to learn what the caterpillar would do. But wildlife observation takes great patience. One must be prepared to wait. So we waited and waited, but the caterpillar didn’t move. We asked each other if he was hiding, and also how he managed to stick to the leaf while upside down. We had no answers. To pass the time, we examined the milkweed more carefully. We saw a number of caterpillar droppings on one leaf, just one, and not the one to which he was clinging. What was this? We believed they were his, as they seemed fairly fresh and he was the only caterpillar present. Nor were other milkweeds nearby that could shelter other caterpillars who might have come over and done this. But we didn’t think he could have made so many droppings all at once. I had seen a wooly bear make droppings, and if I remember rightly, he made only one or two. Here, there were at least ten or twelve—surely far too many to make all at once—so did this mean that our caterpillar visited that leaf when he needed to make a dropping? Many animals have latrines, but caterpillars? I knew very little about caterpillars, as did Jasper at that point in his life, and we had no explanation for the phenomenon. So we looked further and found tiny round holes in other leaves. We thought we knew what this meant—the caterpillar had been eating—but not very much from any one leaf, perhaps because the poison milk of milkweed tastes so horrible. Monarchs have no choice, of course—they eat only milkweed, which makes them poisonous, hence birds avoid them—but an injured milkweed can take a moment before it starts to ooze, so perhaps the caterpillar took his bites before the oozing started in earnest. Meanwhile we kept checking on him to see if he would move, but he didn’t. It was getting dark. We decided to come back the next day.

  And we did, again in the evening. In our absence the caterpillar had climbed the plant and was standing quietly in plain sight on top of a higher leaf. No droppings were visible this time, not even the ones from the day before. Had the wind blown them off the leaf? We didn’t know. And as far as we could tell, no new holes had been eaten in the other leaves. Again we watched the caterpillar for a long time and again he did nothing. Could he have known that we were there and was trying to be inconspicuous? The thought was tempting, but monarch caterpillars are brightly colored for the purpose of being conspicuous. Anyone who eats one will never eat another. To be noticed should therefore not disturb a monarch caterpillar. Unless—and here another tempting thought occurred to us—he knew the difference between birds and other creatures, and might not have been concerned about birds but could have been concerned about us, with our giant shadows falling on him.

  By then we were thoroughly engaged with this caterpillar and we decided to come back in the morning. But Jasper had a swimming lesson in the morning so I went back on my own. Yes! The caterpillar was still there, but on yet another leaf, and this time he was eating. If only Jasper could have seen it! The caterpillar
was slowly taking tiny bites on either side of the leaf’s central vein. I checked on him a few hours later and found that he had folded the leaf in half, like a hand palm up with fingers closed, and the fold was where he had been taking bites. Perhaps he had chewed into the central vein in order to weaken it and enable him to fold the leaf. Or if the vein was too hard for him to bite, perhaps he had removed the surrounding leaf tissue that would have reinforced it.

  He was standing on top of what once was the underside of the leaf. Certain caterpillars roll themselves in leaves to pupate, but I’ve never heard that monarchs did this—as far as I knew, they find a suitable twig somewhere, spin a little silk that they grip with the rear pseudopod and hang upside down in the same position we would assume if we hung by our knees and bent our heads to look up at our chests. Their skin then loses its conspicuous striping, assumes a plain, leaflike color—not the color of a fresh, green leaf but of a faded, unappetizing leaf with tiny spots—and hardens into a smooth chrysalis from which, about ten days later, they emerge in butterfly form. That being so, I could think of no reason why this caterpillar had gone to so much effort to fold a leaf. But the act of folding probably wasn’t random. Everything an insect does has purpose. As a friend once said, insects are never wrong.

  I waited for Jasper to come home late in the afternoon. With great anticipation we went to the milkweed, but the caterpillar was gone. So was the folded leaf on which he had been standing. What could have happened? We searched in the leaf litter below the milkweed in hopes, perhaps, of finding him or at least the folded leaf, but we didn’t. We never saw him again.