PA Ecology II

I was driving home late after the game on Friday, and on a particularly dark stretch of road on Elmerton Avenue I saw a deer standing in the middle of the road. When I came home I looked it up and found that it was a Pennsylvania white-tailed deer. The white-tailed deer, or Odocoileus virginianus, is very common all across most of North America, but most people see them very infrequently.

They tend to hide during the day and come out at night in favor of easier camouflage. Deer are very comfortable living in woods or open prairie lands; they are very adaptable due to their large diet. They eat legumes, leaves, grass, cacti, mushrooms, poison ivy, acorns, corn and fruits. Like cows they have a four chambered stomach system which allows them to not only eat such a large variety of foods, but to digest said foods at more opportune times when they are not out and about or being pursued by predators.

         White-tailed deer fall prey every year to wolves, alligators, bears, wolverines, cougars, coyotes, and especially humans. To get away from all these things that would try to eat them, they can run up to approximately 47 mph, and can jump 33 feet lengthwise and nearly 9 feet vertically. They have white tails (duh), four legs with large muscles for bounding, a head designed for near all around vision with ears that swivel to pinpoint noises easier. They grow to weights 200 pounds, lengths of up to 87 inches long and a shoulder height of approximately 40 inches. These dimensions change depending on which subspecies of white-tailed deer you are dealing with, but these specs are close to deer in our area which are on the high medium to low large sized deer.

While I did not get the chance to take a picture of the deer myself, this is a picture I found which looks close to what I almost hit. I was on Elmerton Avenue at about 10:30 PM on 10/12/12 when I encountered the deer that could have cost me my car. As I slowed down it began to look at me, and after I flashed my high beams a few times it decided to turn and bound away into a patch of trees by the post office. I had only seen a deer this big once before, and that was at 6 AM when I was walking my dogs some months ago. Usually my dogs bark at whatever they see, but this time they stood stock still, not really sure what they were looking at or what to do.

Sources:

http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/deer/11949

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_deer

http://www.nhptv.org/natureworks/whitetaileddeer.htm

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/white-tailed-deer/

http://www.desertusa.com/mag99/june/papr/wtdeer.html