Cervids In the Backyard

Since our retirement, we have had the good fortune of living in two homes.  One, our spring/summer home, is on Long Island where we can walk each day down to and by the sea, actually the Long Island Sound.  The other, our fall/winter home, is at an elevation of 7,000-ft. in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah where we can hike, snowshoe or ski each day.  Interestingly, these two dramatically different environments have something quite special in common.  Both homes have backyards which are frequented by cervids.   What, you may ask, is a cervid?  Pedantically speaking, a cervid is a ruminant which has deciduous antlers (rather than horns).  A ruminant is, in turn, an ungulate which chews its cud.  An ungulate is a mammal which stands (and walks and runs) on its toes.  The ruminants walk on two toes per foot.  Finally, completing the classification, a mammal is a backboned animal with hair (as opposed to scales or feathers) which secretes milk to feed its young.  More simply, on Long Island the cervids in our backyard are white tail deer while in Utah the cervids in our backyard are moose and mule deer.

As many people who live in suburban or rural communities in the East and Midwest know, white tail deer have had a major resurgence over the last couple of decades.  The good news is that they are never aggressive, are very graceful and, depending on age and gender, are at some times very cute and at other times strikingly majestic.  The bad news is that they reproduce very rapidly, have no natural predators in this environment (aside from automobiles), are capable of feeding on almost any kind of vegetation, and host Lyme disease bearing tics.  So, we watch these beautiful creatures wipe out our garden and landscape plantings as we check ourselves for Lyme disease transmitting ticks and wait for the deer themselves to die of starvation in the next harsh winter.  Note the majesty of the bucks in Fig. 1 and 2.

Fig. 1

 

Fig. 2

 

Fauns are extremely cute, especially seen with their mothers, Fig. 3-5.

Fig. 3

 

Fig. 4

 

Fig. 5

 

And, contrary to any previous experience I’ve had, fauns and bucks seem to hang out together quite amiably as seen in Fig. 6.

Fig. 6

 

In the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, we are not as overrun with cervids.  Here we see cervids only a few times each week rather than a few times each day.  In our Utah backyard the cervid is more apt to be a moose than a mule deer.  On average a couple times a week we see moose eating and sitting around chewing their cuds.  Both the moose and mule deer can eat almost any vegetation, being ruminants with their extremely sophisticated and efficient digestive system.  However here in Utah we have mostly wild vegetation unlike our neighborhood on Long Island.  In addition, here in Utah, unlike the East and Midwest, the cervids do have natural predators: mountain lions.

Mule deer are very like a white tail deer in both shape and size, but have somewhat different coloring (waving a black tipped rather than pure white tail as they run), have larger ears (more mule-like) and have forking antlers rather than a series of tines extending from a single bar on each side, as is the case of white tail deer.  In our backyard near the ocean, the deer eat the vegetation and run playfully.  In our backyard in the mountains, the deer and moose eat the vegetation but run to avoid being eaten by the mountain lions.  In Fig. 7 is a typical long eared mule deer doe while Fig. 8 shows the rare case of both a moose and deer sharing our backyard, (with the moose standing in a children’s sandbox).

Fig. 7

 

Fig. 8

 

Fig 9. shows tracks about a quarter mile up behind our house in Utah made after an early October snowfall this year.  These tracks, nearly as large as an adult human hand, with four oval clawless toes and a three-lobed pad is definitely that of a mountain lion.

 

 Fig. 9

 

Fig. 10 shows the site where a mountain lion feed.  The site was located only about  50 feet behind our woodpile and we discovered it just a few days after we observed the above tracks.  Interestingly, mountain lions remove much of the hair from a deer they are consuming.  The hair is clearly visible in the photo.  Presumably, hair balls are just as much a problem for 150 lbs. mountain lions as they are for 8 lbs. house cats.

Fig. 10

 

Finally, Fig. 11 shows the discarded carcass of the deer.  The lion left the head and feet as well as the major bones of the rest of the body.

Fig. 11

 

We have seen evidence of four kills over the past four years and they have all been of mule deer.  However, it is well established that mountain lions also take elk and moose.  Since moose weigh up to 1000 lbs. and mountain lions virtually never exceed 180 lbs. it is not surprising that they usually go after younger, smaller moose.  Nevertheless, they are clearly skilled enough and strong enough to deal with prey much larger than themselves.

The proliferation of white tail deer near large human populations is a serious problem for which I am unaware of a solution.  Clearly mountain lions as we have in Utah (or wolves found further north in Wyoming) are not acceptable in a suburban environment.  Hunting might work where human densities are modest, but where we live on Long Island, houses are typically within a couple hundred feet of each other in all directions and the use of even a bow for hunting would present serious danger.   If I were a young entrepreneurial biologist, I believe I might undertake the development of a safe, effective deer birth control product for which I believe there would be a huge market.  It would have to be something sophisticated to be both effective and safe.  Perhaps, it could be based on some chemical introduced into the environment to confuse the deer’s pheromone based mating in the fall of the year or a drug injected into some plant that only a deer could eat and digest which reduced fertility.  In any case, it seems a worthwhile area of research.

On  a more cheerful note, just as with the white tail deer on Long Island, the whole moose family, bulls, cows and calves frequent our backyard in Utah and interact as though it were their home, which I guess it is.  Below is a five-minute video comprising clips taken this fall by an infrared triggered camera in our backyard approximately 50 feet from where the deer had been consumed a couple of weeks earlier.  To our surprise, the moose being filmed engaged in substantial vocalization.  Over a half century of experience with white tail deer, aside from an occasional snort when alarmed, I have never heard one of them vocalize.

Moose, the largest of the cervids in our backyard.