The Hidden Life of Deer, page 3
Determining gender by behavior was possible but prone to error. The males were more careless than the females. Whether this was because they were more confident, or because they were less concerned with the safety of others, I didn’t know. If startled by something, they might simply run away with their tails down or lifted loosely, not raised up high and flagging, like the females. The females were more cautious, looked up more often, listened more often, and if alarmed, immediately raised their tails in a yard-long display of pure white hair—the white tail and white rump patch, one above the other—with the tail vigorously waving side to side. This must be the most conspicuous sight in all of nature. No deer can miss it, none can ignore it, and all who see it immediately bound away with their own tails up and waving.
Unusual markings were helpful, but I found very few. Two young deer had ridges of hair on their necks, almost like little manes. Another had a tuft of hair on its back, as if from an old injury. Still another—a fawn—was exceptionally fuzzy like a little buffalo. But most deer didn’t have unusual features. Sometimes they seemed to, and this was deceptive. For instance, all deer have small white spots inside and outside their hind legs and between their toes—the marks of different kinds of scent glands—and when I saw a large deer with enormous white spots on his legs, I thought I had him. But when I saw him again without large spots, I took him for a different deer. It was him, but when I first saw him he had spread open the patches of hair that covered his tarsal glands, probably because he was near a human habitation and was nervous, and was broadcasting his concern with his tarsal pheromone. The next time I saw him, he may have felt more secure, because he kept his tarsal patches shut like the others.
I seemed to be getting nowhere. Then one day, it came to me that my thinking was all wrong. I was viewing the deer as an aggregate of individuals. But deer are no more that than we are. I may be an individual, yes, but only in a way. Otherwise, I’m my husband’s wife, my children’s mother, and my grandchildren’s grandmother, and thus am considerably more than just an out-of-context member of my species. As such, I’d be hard to locate in a crowd. The observer would need to have learned my various features, just as I was trying to learn those of the deer. If he then saw another woman about five feet two with short gray hair (how many of those could there possibly be?) he could get us mixed up.
But together with my family I’d be easy to spot. Reliably, our group would have the same number of big ones, middle-size ones, and small ones every time. We would come as a group and leave as a group, although we might mix with others when we got there. But once an observer had identified our group, he could then note a few special characteristics of some of us, maybe a mustache on the oldest male, two young females the same size, and a tall, dark-haired female with a little child, and he’d have us nailed. If it was me he was looking for, he could scan the group for the gray-haired female, and there I’d be—the only one. What’s more, any such group would be different enough from any other group that if someone was missing or a visitor was added, the group would still be recognizable, and the change could be noted. None of this might be true a year later—some of us might be bigger, another infant might be present, and still others might be permanently missing, but we are not speaking of a year, we are speaking of a season. The same is true of deer.
This was the breakthrough. From then on, recognizing the deer was almost easy. Of course, since they were deer, not primates, their groups were not like those we might form but were appropriate to their own kind—the females close together with their young, and the males associating loosely—a modest version of deer such as red deer and caribou, who form large, highly organized groups of mothers, daughters, and children of both genders with mature males scattered nearby. As for the whitetails I was watching, a group of males might have four members today and six tomorrow, or disintegrate completely as the former members went different ways, or a yearling male could join his mother briefly, giving her group a surprising extra member. But the female groups are fairly constant, so recognizing them even with their male associates became possible. There they were, day after day, pretty much the same in the spring as they had been all winter. Deer grow very little if at all in winter, so even the fawns seemed unchanging. For me, this was a great experience. It was something like learning a language that seems impenetrable at first, just a mixture of noise. But if you try hard enough and keep at it long enough, sooner or later every little word has meaning.
Chapter Three
Deer Families
The first group that I came to know was led by a large, very beautiful doe who traveled with a second, slightly smaller doe. Female deer stay with their mothers for indefinite periods, perhaps until they themselves have fawns and thus are fawns no longer, so this young female was undoubtedly the beautiful doe’s daughter, possibly born in 2006, possibly earlier. Also with the beautiful doe were twin fawns, obviously hers, born in 2007. To help secure this group in my mind, I began with the letter A and called them Group Alpha.
As it turned out, the name fit them perfectly. The beautiful doe had status, lots of it, and, interestingly enough, so did her children. Her twin fawns were too young to exert much authority, but if the feeding area became crowded, her highborn older daughter might stare at a newcomer, or raise a forefoot as a threat, or even strike at the newcomer. Just a stare was usually enough to cause the newcomer to lower her ears, turn her head slowly, and back away. When the newcomer was at a safe distance, her ears would come wistfully forward and she would watch the princess eat. This was true, even though she might be bigger and thus older than the princess. On one occasion, the princess dared to threaten a large male who was preparing to jump over the stone wall into the feeding area. He didn’t like the way the princess was looking at him, had second thoughts, and didn’t jump. Mostly, though, the deer whom this privileged group excluded were thin or young or both, and thus were surely of low status. Blessed are the poor, but not in deer cosmology.
In normal times, foraging opportunities are spread widely enough so that most deer can nourish themselves. This, of course, is why low-status deer are present at all—the forest is too big for the high-status deer to control everything, and also, since there’s enough for everybody, they don’t need to. However, when forage is limited, the high-status deer get most of it. When, for example, the acorn crop is scanty, yet acorns are needed for weight gain for winter, the high-status deer get most of them. It’s easy enough to control the space under an oak tree. Thus low-status deer can be thin when winter comes. The pregnant females can have trouble nourishing their unborn fawns. In spring, such fawns can be very small at birth, and they may, if they live, always be smaller than the highborn fawns. In contrast, the high-ranking mothers control the best foods, hence their offspring are better nourished during pregnancy, and are led to the best foods thereafter. When food is limited, especially in an area that’s easy to control, the high-ranking deer can own it.
Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” has been used to justify all manner of human indecency, and some people may find high status unfair or even unpleasant in animals. It didn’t make me happy to see the more vulnerable deer sometimes excluded, but the deer felt otherwise, and took whatever measures they thought were appropriate to promote their own well-being and that of their children. Dr. Rue has this to say about such exclusion: “In the world of nature, there is no such thing as fair play; everything is done for keeps, everything possible is done just to survive.”[1] All I could add to that is that deer have been around for five million years and must know what they’re doing. As far as their population is concerned, it’s good that some of them are in top shape, even if all of them cannot be. A winter such as that of 2007–2008 can bring a population to its knees. But the healthiest deer may survive. If so, a few years later, deer will be plentiful again, in all their social complexity. I suppose I could have tried to scare off the highborn deer when I saw the humble deer coming, but I didn’t, not only because the humble deer would run away with the others, but also because the exclusions were due to deer politics, and were thus immune to human influence, just as our politics would be immune to the influence of deer.
Often while watching the highborn deer eat corn, the humble deer would eat twigs from the surrounding bushes. Sometimes a dry hydrangea blossom would blow off its bush and roll toward them like a little tumbleweed. They ate those too. The highborn deer didn’t seem to care, so probably all concerned saw an important difference between the corn and the other, natural foods that were present. The corn had lots of calories, and the twigs and dry blossoms had very few, hence it was food value, not the act of eating, that was causing the distinction. It was as if the humble deer were saying to the highborn deer, “The better things are yours.”
What gave Group Alpha their status? My best guess is that the beautiful doe was in the prime of her life, therefore deserving of status, and that many of the other deer in the area were her children and her children’s children, and as such would acknowledge her importance. After I learned the identities of these groups, I realized that this beautiful doe was usually the first to come to the feeding area. She would lead her group down a hillside to the south, across the ice on a pond, and through our field toward us. Her approach was the signal for other deer in far-flung places to leave the woods. How did they know that Group Alpha was coming? It’s hard to say, but it didn’t seem to be because they saw them or heard them. As far as we know, deer do not make ultrasound or infrasound, hence if Group Alpha had made a noise that could be heard by deer half a mile to the north, I would have heard it too, and I heard nothing. Nor did the time of day influence their joint arrivals—all they seemed to need was strong daylight. My best guess is that the answer lies in smell. Deer are olfactory animals, and thus produce informational odors and pheromones that speak to others. Most deer came from the north and east, but the beautiful doe came from the south with the prevailing wind behind her. It could be that her signal was carried on the air.
She seemed to be much on the minds of the others, even when she wasn’t present. On the rare occasions that others came toward the feeding area before she did, they would stand in the field and look around, perhaps to learn where she was. Or they would fix their eyes on the woods to the south, as if they were expecting her to emerge. They held their tails loose, twitching slightly, but they didn’t stamp their feet or seem agitated as they would if they suspected predators. Perhaps they felt that they were trespassing and were nervous to be eating without permission.
This was surprising, considering that all were hungry. This was what told me that there was more to deer society than I had at first supposed. Similarly, the departure of the Alphas was also a sign to the others. They followed whether they had eaten or not, even though there was still plenty of food, even though the departing deer had no real way of knowing what would happen in the feeding area after they left. Day after day, the Alphas would leave the feeding area when they felt like it, cross the ice on the pond, and climb the next hill toward their shelter area, which I believed was in a massive growth of evergreens on the north side, the lee side, of the hill. The four Alphas would walk slowly, always in single file. Four or five others might trail directly behind. The rest of them would head off for their own shelter areas, and the feeding area would empty, like a theater after a performance.
Why did the other deer insist on coming when she did? Usually, the deer spent no more than half an hour in the feeding area. That left about eight hours of daylight during which anyone could have been there. Why didn’t some of them take advantage? One can only guess, but since this happened in the early months of winter, when all the deer must have been uncertain about approaching a house, it might be that if a doe of her stature found the area acceptable, the others did too, and came because they respected her wisdom and because there was safety in numbers. That explanation seemed simple and obvious, but many things that animals do are neither simple nor obvious, and while the explanation may be somewhat valid, I didn’t think it was enough.
I haven’t always lived in New Hampshire. When I was in my late teens and early twenties I lived in the unexplored interior of the Kalahari Desert in Africa with people who were hunter-gatherers. My father was more than a farmer. He was also a civil engineer and a businessman, and later in life, an explorer. My mother was an anthropologist. That’s why we went. The experience stayed with me, and ever since then, I’ve seen the world through the lens of the Kalahari. The people among whom we lived had been there for 35,000 years at least and as such, were living the life we all once lived when we were part of the African savannah fauna. They lived in the Old Way, and their culture had enormous stability, meaning that they kept the Old Rules that were laid down by necessity—the kind of rules that all who live in the natural world must keep. But unlike other species, ours can be interviewed, and today, when I find a mystery of nature, I turn to the discussions we had with the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari for a possible answer.
So when I saw all deer depart my feeding area just because the Alpha group was leaving, I thought of the Kalahari, and remembered the respect its people had for other people’s things. These were tied so closely to the owner as to be almost part of the owner. If, for instance, we Americans find a gold ring on the street, we pick it up. We might then keep it or might try to find whoever lost it. Either alternative is more or less acceptable to us. But if the Kalahari people found a similar object they’d leave it where it was. Why? Because it belonged to someone. That the owner wasn’t with it didn’t matter. He or she would probably come back for it someday. To violate the concept would have been to violate the all-important intergroup relations, and never happened. Our relationships and our social systems were our lifelines during the 150,000 years that our species lived on the savannah, just as they are for any social species. The Old Rules must be kept. If the deer at my feeding area departed when the Alpha doe departed, then perhaps it was an Old Rule they were keeping—the kind of rule that governs what you do, whether or not others are watching.
The theory of safety in numbers has merit too. I found some support for it in that when the deer came, the turkeys would take their presence as a safety signal and come too, and would mix right in with them. In order to eat, the deer would have to put their faces down among the turkeys, even touching them. Interestingly, some of the deer who chased other deer seemed flummoxed by the turkeys. Only rarely would a deer try to chase a turkey. When the turkeys finished eating, they would depart in single file without a backward glance, as if the deer no longer mattered. My guess that deer came together for their mutual safety was somewhat confirmed toward the end of winter. Then, deer seemed to come of their own initiative, as if they no longer needed proof that the area was safe. By the end of March, they were not coordinating but seemed to come and go in their small groups pretty much as they pleased, and even the humblest deer were eating.
It was hard to be sure, because in March, the beautiful doe stopped coming. I think this was because the ice was softening on the pond. As far as I know, the last deer to walk across the ice did so on March 16. I held my breath as I watched her, wondering what to do if she fell in. But the ice held, and she made it. A few days later the ice was almost gone and the brook was over its banks. The beautiful doe and her family would have had to add almost a mile to their journey, going upstream to a crossing place, then coming back downstream to reach my feeding area if they didn’t want to swim or wade through deep, icy water. Perhaps they didn’t want to spend energy by traveling so far. In theory, they could have come by road, but the deer of these parts don’t travel along roads, although they cross them. However, the Alphas seemed in good condition when I last saw them, and snow on the fields was melting, so grass was already exposed. If anyone could make it through to summer, the Alphas could.
A deer with high status could be a detriment to some, but she also offered advantages, not only to her own group, but also to all others. The beautiful doe of Group Alpha was watchful and cautious, which, I think, was because of her responsibility. She kept watch more carefully than any other deer, and others trusted her messages. Not that they ignored warnings by others, but many of the younger deer could fling up their heads or flag their tails without causing general consternation. Sometimes a young deer in the feeding area would flag and dash off as a trick. A few others might take alarm and do the same, at which point the young deer would turn back and eat the food the others had abandoned. But the beautiful doe was far above that sort of trickery, nor did she need to resort to it—if she wanted someone else’s food she had only to take it. She was in charge, and everyone knew it.
If she looked at something in the distance, others would move near her to try to see what it was. Sometimes she was watching the turkeys, gathering into their flock of fifty, preparing to march in single file across the field to visit the feeding area. More often she was watching other deer, perhaps four, perhaps six, deep in the woods but on their way to the field. If the beautiful doe moved out of the feeding area for a better look, those near her went with her, also for a better look. The approaching deer would stay in the woods until the beautiful doe stopped staring.
Like many other deer, she found the sight of midsize animals unpleasant, and if she saw one, perhaps our cat who had escaped from the house or a fox at the edge of the woods, she would snort and stamp one foot. Then she’d stamp the other foot. Once she stamped at me when she noticed me looking out a window. By deer standards, I would not be a midsize animal, but on that occasion only my head and shoulders were showing. Her object was to make sure that no danger would come to her followers. She would slowly approach the suspect, head high, eyes threatening. The deer around her might do the same, but they would make sure to keep the beautiful doe in their peripheral vision so they could see what she was doing. If the suspect was a distant fox, he might just keep going. The deer would watch him out of sight. If the suspect was our cat, she would not be pleased by the staring, and would go back into the house through the dog door. The deer would then continue eating.
