A question I had always asked myself and never did go all the way to find the answer and that question was,
Where do most of the Deer go during the Winter?. As I browsed the internet today I found this article on
"Deer and Deer Hunting".
Why Do Deer Starve Themselves in Winter?
As a child, I liked to ride to the end of the road and observe the deer that gathered in the winter, flitting among the dark, overhanging hemlocks - - of their traditional deer yard along the creek banks.
To my young eyes, it seemed a cold and cheerless place; as I grew older and realized that each winter many deer actually starved to death in the yards, I wondered all the more why, year after year, they came back to a place where all the browse within reach had long ago been eaten. It seemed to show a sad lack of intelligence for the survivors of each winter's ordeal to return again and again to the scene of such devastation.
When, a few months ago, I began some serious reading on the subject of behavioral ecology, I encountered the concept of "adaptive value," or the way in which an animal's behavior increases its chances of survival as a species.
Again I thought of the curious behavior of whitetailed deer in the wintertime. I wondered what could be the adaptive value of going into a winter yard where many deer were doomed to starve, and even the survivors were weakened and suffered terrible privations. There must be some overwhelming benefit from yarding to counterbalance the heavy death toll, but I did not know what that benefit might be.
In some cases, several small "herds" exist within what appears to be a large, continuous deer yard. The details of this social hierarchy, while interesting, are outside the scope of this article. What is important is the fact that the structure exists, for social interaction of the individuals in a species is an important factor in the adaptation of the species to its environment.
We are concerned not with the survival of individuals, but with the survival of the species. Variation in behavior among individuals is necessary, for it is upon such variation that selection works in order to evolve the behavior pattern best adapted to the environment in which the species lives. If members of a species have nothing to do with one another, and act only as individuals, their experiences will not contribute to the collective knowledge or "culture" of the species. There will be no tradition.
Deer do show a capacity to learn, and fawns learn a great deal from their mothers, so learned behavior certainly influences their adaptation to a changing environment. Biologists have done innumerable studies of the whitetailed deer, its habitat, social structure and behavior.
But very few of these studies examine the adaptive significance of winter yarding behavior from an evolutionary standpoint, or attempt to explain how such behavior is perpetuated over the years.
Two of the most interesting studies on the subject are the doctoral research done by George Mattfeld at Huntington Forest in New York's Adirondacks, and the work of Michael Nelson and L. David Mech in the wilderness of northeastern Minnesota. Mattfeld, in his 1974 doctoral dissertation, approaches the question of why deer move to winter yards from the perspective of energetics- yarding saves energy, thus increases the chance that deer who yard will survive to produce young the following spring.
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