What’s a deer? To early settlers, a deerskin meant a dollar in trade for a huge export market. The word buck consequently entered our monetary vocabulary. Deer also meant a special dinner. To contemporary nonhunters, deer may mean the anthropomorphically adorable fantasy figure, Bambi. Not everyone, however, loves deer.
To the parent whose child suffers from incurable Lyme disease, tick-bearing deer are dangerous vermin to be exterminated. To farmers who lose much of their squash, pumpkin, apple and corn crops, they’re income-draining parasites. To homeowners whose gardens and landscaping are plundered, they’re property vandals. To victims of deer collisions — or insurance companies that have to pay out claims — they’re costly and sometimes fatal liabilities. To freshly emerging saplings, lilies or lady’s slippers in unmanaged, over-browsed forests, they’re a leveling devastation, no less horrific than Sherman’s army. Left unchecked, they can browse away a forest’s future.
But to us bow hunters who seek invisibility, study winds and sit in our tree stands from before dawn to after sunset, deer are a magical obsession. White-tails are the spirit of our forest, irresistibly beckoning us to study and admire them year-round.
Deer nourish us and, in turn, they consume our imaginations and benefit from our management. Their pursuit goes far beyond mere recreation as we ascetically endure cold and inevitable sleep loss. Bow hunting is our therapy and connection with the wildest and most elusive element of our natural world.
Though devoid of tooth and claw for weapons, we are as important a natural predator as the mountain lion and wolf. In devouring venison, we incorporate its atomic essence into our own.
Deer permanently become part of our body’s chemistry, as well as a major element of our thoughts, dreams and imaginations.
Like many hunters, I spend much of my life trying to completely know and understand them. The impossibility of that quest explains part of their infinite allure.
Most hunters are at a loss to define a deer. Although they can recognize the majority of the world’s deer when they see them, many are stumped by those that don’t fit the stereotypical mold of a deciduously antlered browser.
When I show pictures of long-fanged, antlerless bucks from hunts and photographic safaris around the world, it becomes apparent that it’s not easy to define a deer today — and it wasn’t easy in the past, either.
“Der” was originally an Old English Beofwulf-Period word that referred to any animal, including fish, insects, fox, as well as deer. Not until much later in the Middle English period around 1400 — the time of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales — did the word begin to acquire its specific contemporary meaning.
But even as late as the early 1600’s, when Shakespeare wrote King Lear, the great author had his pathetic character Edgar eating “mice and rats and such small deer” — meaning any lowly, small ground animal.
Most hunters define a deer by the presence of deciduous antlers. They’re only partially correct. While most deer species do sport antlers, several others, including diminutive Chinese water deer, musk deer, mouse deer, and the African water chevrotain, have no antlers at all, fighting and displaying with long, prominent fangs instead.
For biologists, the 45 or so species of deer — many very different from each other — are all artiodactyl ungulate ruminants of the Cervidaefamily, lacking upper incisors and a gall bladder.
Like all artiodactyls, including pigs, hippos, camels, cattle and antelopes, deer have hooves with an even number of toes.
Like all ruminants, including antelope, sheep and goats, deer chew their cud, a survival strategy that enables them to quickly swallow food in the midst of potential danger — and to eat it later in safety.
To do that, deer had to develop a stomach with four chambers, the top compartment being a unique rumen. Food is first partially digested there before it’s regurgitated for several subsequent chewings, enabling a deer to extract maximum nourishment with the further help of the other three chambers.
The process creates much heat, which allows them to endure severely cold temperatures.
The Cervidae family of deer is much different from the Bovidae family (think bulls and bison), which grow permanent, not deciduous, horns. At this level, we can separate our deer from Africa’s antelope.
Successful hunters don’t need to know scientific definitions. But learning all we can about our most cherished deer can be a profoundly rewarding, life-long endeavor, limited only by our physical strength and intellectual curiosity.
While we hunters may have trouble defining deer, for three challenging and exciting months, deer will effectively have no problem defining much of our lives.
Contact Mark Blazis at markblazis@charter.net.
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