And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
~F. Scott Fitzgerald,The Great Gatsby
Things have been relatively quiet on the trail cameras the past month. No coyote sightings in several weeks, and even the squirrels seem to be taking a vacation in our woods (though not the ones learning to get to our hanging bird feeder). But one thing has been showing up – young animals. June and July are the months when many young critters start to get out and follow their moms around to learn the ways of the woods. At our place that means White-tailed Deer fawns and Raccoon kits.
Here are a few clips of forest cuteness from our property…
The most common baby animal footage was of deer fawns. The well-known spots on baby deer help them blend into the sun-dappled forest floor. This is especially important when their mom leaves them in one place as she goes off to feed. Lying on the ground motionless, and virtually scentless, they are difficult for predators to find. Fawns typically lose their spots after 3 to 4 months. One online resource said the average number of spots on a fawn’s coat ranges from 272-342. And each spot is between about 1/4 to 1/2 inches in diameter…now you know.
In addition to the mammal babies, there are lots of insect and spider youngsters in our wildflower beds and the bluebirds have just laid another set of eggs. You gotta love the abundance of summer!
-This is the third bluebird nest this season in the box in our yard
Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.
~Ken Liu
I recognize a buck scrape in our woods when I see one. It is a bare patch of earth with lots of hoof scrapes and deer tracks under an overhanging low limb (usually an evergreen). One or more twigs are often broken from the buck thrashing about. This behavior and the commonly seen bark rubs on tree saplings are two important ways that bucks communicate with one another. It is like a bulletin board in a storefront, one loaded with local business cards. The bucks leave their calling card through various glands on the head and through marking and urinating on the now bare ground beneath the overhanging branch. While any deer passing the area may stop to check it out, most buck scrapes appear to be created and used primarily by male deer, and mainly in the time leading up to and during the rut.
– Bare ground under a low overhanging American Holly branch is a sure sign of a buck scrape (click photos to enlarge)
– The only scrape on our property not under a holly branch. This large patch of bare ground is under an American Beech branch and comes with a bark rub on a nearby sapling.
But now I have found something that may qualify as a so-called community scrape. This is a location that has significance to all the deer in an area and is a major communication sign post – a social media bulletin board for the deer. My first connection with this site was last year when I placed a trail camera on it. It is a part of our creek that is just upstream of a huge log jam created when a large hickory fell and took a few other trees with it. I recorded what I thought was an odd phenomenon of a doe pulling on holly leaves on a low branch. During the couple of weeks the camera was there it caught a few deer doing this same thing. I was puzzled because I didn’t think anything would eat those spiny leaves.
Last month, I put another camera in that same location and started seeing both bucks and does stopping and interacting with the same holly branch. But this time, I could tell they were mainly just rubbing their heads and faces on the branch, not trying to eat the leaves. Below are a few of the videos.
It is hard to tell in these videos, but a behavior that is described in research is deer using the “licking branch”. They chew or lick a particular branch as part of the ritual. I certainly have seen a broken twig or two at these various scrapes and have seen photos of bucks using their tongue to touch branches at a scrape, but I can’t tell for sure if there is any of that going on here.
You may remember the crazy deer from an earlier post that ran around, jumping, twisting, and pawing in the creek. I think this last clip is that same deer. One reason I didn’t notice the significance of this holly branch is that it is over the creek, so there is not the usual sign of bare ground underneath (when the creek dries up it is just the dry ground line anywhere else along that stretch of stream bed). Here is that deer interacting with the holly several times and acting a bit goofy again. I wonder if part of the reason for its antics is the chemical messages at this site?
I stuck my nose into this branch to see if I can detect any odors, but it seems that I just don’t have the right receptors. It stands to reason that if I don’t understand some of my species’ social media messages, I wouldn’t understand those of our neighborhood deer. But I’ll keep watching and trying to figure out what they are saying.
The life of the wood, meadow, and lake go on without us. Flowers bloom, set seed and die back; squirrels hide nuts in the fall and scold all year long; bobcats track the snowy lake in winter; deer browse the willow shoots in spring. Humans are but intruders who have presumed the right to be observers, and who, out of observation, find understanding.
~Ann Zwinger
I am familiar with the behavior of male White-tailed deer (bucks) during the breeding season (the rut) – they don’t eat much, they are challenging (often with antler to antler struggles) other bucks in the area for dominance and the opportunity to mate with the females that come into estrus, they chase females, and they tend to lose much of their wariness. All this generally occurs in the Fall, usually peaking in early November in our woods. There is a phenomenon called the second rut that can happen when some females that did not mate successfully come into estrus 30 days or so after the first rut is complete, usually in January.
But my trail cameras picked up a spate of antler testing behavior running through the month of February. I’m not sure what is happening, but maybe it is just “boys being boys”. They have formed some bachelor groups that hang out together through much of the day and night and it seems that after dark they like to test their strength by pushing and shoving a bit. The more evenly matched they are, the better the show, but I do admire one buck that just has nubs for antlers that tries to enter the fray to show his toughness.
I have not seen any of this activity during daylight hours (though the cameras do pick up buck hanging out together) and there seems to be a preference for performing these feats of buck showmanship at the cameras located on the creek. Here are some highlights of bucks doing their thing (volume up)…
They seem to have tired of this showmanship with the onset of March. Perhaps it is related to the fact that the first week of March caught the first image of a buck that has dropped an antler.
The cameras picked up this behavior on several nights, with these bouts often lasting many minutes. There was lots of maneuvering, some pawing of the ground, and plenty of head fakes and false starts to go along with the energetic pushing and clacking of antlers. There is so much happening in our woods after dark. As of this week, the largest bucks are still holding onto their complete antler set, but it won’t be for long. Now, if only I can find some antler sheds.
White-tailed deer were observed throughout 1,711 hours on the Welder Wildlife Refuge, Texas. Only 11 events considered to be forms of play were witnessed, seven by fawns and four by adults. It is concluded that white-tailed deer are not typically playful animals.
~Edwin D. Michael, 1968 publication
I did some research online after looking at some recent trail camera footage to try to explain what I was seeing. The quote above is the abstract from a paper published in 1968 in The American Midland Naturalist. Maybe Texas deer are more serious than ours, or maybe the deer you about to see has been eating some funny mushrooms…you be the judge (turn volume up and view full screen).
I first thought that the pool of water was the big attraction since most of the creek is very shallow and narrow. But a few days later when the creek bed dried up again, the buck was back (I think it is the same deer anyway). Note the attention paid to the overhanging American Holly branch from time to time (you can also see this to a lesser degree in the other videos). My next post will have some more clues to this mystery.
Maybe deer are more playful than we think, but only act up when we aren’t around. The lesson here may be to live life to the fullest and splash in every puddle, and keep on playing even when things dry up.
Forests will always hold your secrets, for that’s what forests are for.
~Victoria Erickson
We’ve been gone for a couple of weeks (more on that adventure in the next post) and the trail cameras were busy keeping up with the goings-on back home while we were away. Lots of the same sort of behaviors we have seen before, but some heavy rains filled our ephemeral stream and that area became more attractive to many of our woodland neighbors. Here are a few highlights from the last couple of weeks that we would have not known about save for the eyes of the trail cameras.
Your growing antlers, Bambi continued, are proof of your intimate place in the forest, For of all the things that live and grow only the trees and the deer shed their foliage each year and replace it more strongly, more magnificently, in the Spring. Each year the trees grow larger and put on more leaves. And so you too increase In size and wear a larger, stronger crown.
~Felix Salten
After placing a new trail camera down along the wet weather creek, I was rewarded with a very nice clip of a beautiful White-tailed deer buck. This is from February 18, about the time most deer in our area are dropping their antlers for the season. As I mentioned in a recent post about Moose in Yellowstone, antler drop is an annual event for male members of the deer family, caused by changing day-length and lowered testosterone levels after the mating season.
A week ago, I had a very short clip that showed this buck still sports his nice set of antlers. It is getting a bit late for them to still be carrying their antlers, so I would love to have him drop one or both somewhere on our property. I have only found one antler shed here in all the years of roaming these woods. Rodents make short work of shed antlers for their calcium content.
The same day the large buck above was caught on camera, a smaller buck who had dropped its antlers was filmed. Note the roundish scar between the ey and ear – the pedicle. Soon, new antler growth will begin at this site for next mating season’s crowns.
While I relish our warm months, winter forms our character and brings out our best.
~Thomas H. Allen
While we were away in mid-late January we got our biggest snow of the past couple of years (a whopping 3+ inches I believe). We were bummed to miss it (even though we were off on an adventure to our favorite winter wonderland – more on that in the next post). Snow in our woods is special to us and we relish any chance to get out in it and walk the transformed forest. Luckily, our trail cameras captured some of the beauty and activity in our absence. Here are a few highlights…
— A beautiful capture of some of our resident deer in fresh snow
— A large buck that I haven’t seen yet this year made a couple of appearances after the snow
— A coyote shows the typical “I’m in a hurry to get somewhere” travel mode
— Looks like there are more deer out there than I knew about (how many do you see?)
Looking forward to being here in the next “big” snow!
After the ubiquitous squirrels, deer have been the mainstay of the triggers on our three trail cameras. It was a busy fall with deer frequently visiting the vicinity of some oak trees as they searched for scarce acorns. Here are a few other clips showing some behaviors that occur when we are not out in the woods watching them.
— Nothing like a good stretch after spending two hours lounging in a comfy bed of ferns.
— This was back in November, at the tail end of the rut. This buck came through the morning after the deer had been bedded down and he sniffed that spot to check on what was happening in his woods.
— A buck chasing a doe during the rut
— A buck trailing a doe
— During the rut, young bucks do some practice sparring. These two bucks were seen together frequently and seemed to want to test each other every time (remind you of any people in your life?)
— The just can’t help it, here they go again
— And again…by the way, I got another video clip of these guys doing this again this week!
— But these are the guys that probably get the girls
— What’s this?
The cameras reveal differences between individuals and also similarities between all creatures. Knowing more about the lives of our woodland neighbors helps me appreciate them even more.
Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You plant it in the ground and it explodes into an oak.
~George Bernard Shaw
The trail cameras have been busy these past few months with lots of images of squirrels (too many), raccoons, opossums, two coyotes (finally, I was beginning to wonder what happened), a few raptors, loads of deer, some neighbor kids, and, unfortunately, too many outdoor cats. I tend to leave the cameras in one location for some time to try to get a feel for the wildlife activity in that particular area. I moved one camera slightly back in October to get a better angle on what seemed to be a lot of foraging around a large Northern Red Oak down-slope from the house. This has been an off year for acorns in our woods with almost no White Oak acorns produced. White Oak acorns mature in summer and drop in the fall (one year). The red oak group of acorns take 2 years to drop, but some are produced every spring, so, even in a bad acorn production year, there are some red oak acorns still on the tree. So, in our woods this year, the critters that rely on acorns for a portion of their autumn diet have been concentrating on the red oaks.
The deer have been particularly busy at the large red oaks as there isn’t a lot of understory that they haven’t already over-browsed. The one camera placed near the large Northern Red Oak has had a lot of clips taken of the animals scavenging the acorns that have dropped. Interestingly, very few squirrels have been seen eating the acorns on the ground, probably because they tend to do a lot of their foraging in the tree tops. Here is a selection of the goings on at the old oak tree this season…
A group of deer foraging under the large Northern Red Oak on our property
Sometimes they don’t play nice while searching for acorns.
A doe strikes at another deer to drive her away from what might be a good spot for acorns
Sometimes there are other woodland critters getting in on the bounty under the oak tree…
A Southern Flying Squirrel scurries around the oak trunk
A deer wanders over to check out what the raccoon may have found (raccoons were common at night in the area around the tree)
A rabbit was a frequent visitor under the tree
What I enjoyed the most was watching deer crack the acorns – the way their jaws move, the sounds (sound up for these video clips).
A doe chews loudly on an acorn
Crunchy breakfast
The action under this tree was pretty constant, day and night, for a few weeks, lasting through about the third week of November when most of the acorn drop ceased. Now, an occasional visit by a deer is captured on that camera, but they typically are seen sniffing the leaves a bit before moving on. Winter has set in and times will be tougher for some of our woodland neighbors until the spring green starts to appear.
Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
~ Francis Pharcellus Church
It had been over a week since I checked the three trail cameras, so I was anxious to see what had transpired in our patch of woods without us knowing. There has been a definite increase in deer activity and most of the video clips contain images of some of the many (probably too many for the health of our woods) White-tailed Deer going about their business. With acorns and hickory nuts falling, the deer are visiting certain spots under these trees more and slowly searching the ground for the nutritious morsels. It is also getting to be that time of year when the bucks are paying more attention to the does…it is the start of the rut. There are a few big bucks roaming the woods, often in each others’ company. The cameras have caught glimpses of two six-pointers, one eight-pointer, and a number of smaller males (plus many more females and a few young of the year). This clip shows a young buck rubbing his antlers against a Painted Buckeye shrub, no doubt thinking about what might lie ahead (if he is lucky). A doe and fawn are nearby.
Young buck briefly rubs his antlers on shrub
Another video from the south slope showed something I have never observed – some rather unsightly deer warts on two young bucks. At first, I thought they were a type of warble (lesion) that is caused by a botfly. Warbles are common on squirrels here in the Piedmont and the large skin deformations caused by the botfly larvae can be quite grotesque in appearance. But the bumps on these deer looked different. After searching online, I believe these are so-called deer warts, a type of cutaneous fibroma caused by a virus. There are many types of fibroma-causing viruses in nature but this one is specific to deer and cannot be spread to other wildlife or humans. Apparently, they are quite common in deer and can be transmitted when an area with broken skin comes in direct contact with an infected deer or with a surface that an infected deer rubbed against. Studies show that they occur more frequently in male deer, especially young bucks, and the wart-like growths occur most often on the head, neck and forelegs. Though they can be gross-looking, they typically do not harm the deer and they usually regress and vanish over time.
Two young bucks with cutaneous fibromas (deer warts)
The last video clip I’ll share is another thrilling one for us. Earlier this summer, a camera caught a Bobcat walking down our then dry creek bed. That was the first time we have ever had confirmation of these sleek feline predators on our property. Last week, just before sunrise, another Bobcat sighting was made on a trail in the ravine closer to the house. I’m assuming it is the same animal, but who knows! Whatever the case, we are super excited to know this species is roaming our woods. Now, to see one in person…
A Bobcat strolling through our woods just before sunrise last week
Roads End Naturalist 