Semi-Daily Journal

Since Love makes the world goes round, big sexy antlers are worth the trouble. Deer are amazingly agile and flexible so it's quite unlikely that they'd get into any antler related difficulties.

If you spend some time in the forest, you may be lucky enough to see deer (male and female) getting on their stomachs and crawling under dense brush by way of a well developed system of paths. Very surreal looking when you first run into it ... evolution is very cool and has a wonderful sense of humour.

We have a system of such paths running through our acre of blackberries...

Brad DeLong

Male deer engage in combat for territory, banging antlers, and attempting to sumo wrestle their opponent into submission. Sometimes this results in two deer having their antlers entangled permanently, resulting in an extremely difficult death for both.

The energy used in creating those antlers is quickly reclaimed by other woodland creatures after they are shed. Squirrels are notorious for gnawing away at antlers over the winter.

Hunters have been known to walk the woods, seeking shed antlers after deer dispose of them. They will rattle the antlers to attract competitive deer to their hunting stands.

Look for pine trees that have been abused and scraped on your property as the deer attempt to remove the velvet from their antlers.

I've heard of deer dying from entangling antlers with rivals but I've never seen it nor met anyone who had seen it themselves (not that I've brought it up casually in conversation either). Deer certainly die from getting caught in fences or wire so I don't think it's a "rural legend" but I wonder how common it is ...

I've heard hunters talk about does, fawns, bucks, and spikes, but none of the other terminology. Female elk are now called cows, males are called bulls. Probably a British / American difference.

I've heard hunters talk about does, fawns, bucks, and spikes, but none of the other terminology. Female elk are now called cows, males are called bulls. Probably a British / American difference.

Dr. DeLong:

You have an acre of blackberries! Wow, I envy you! My family has had a tradition of picking blackberries every year around July 4 (when they're ripe in the NC Piedmont), but we have to scout around the green parts that are public enough that landowners don't mind us picking off them and private enough that the cops don't see us (not right off highways, for example). When do blackberries ripen where you are?

--James S. W.

July-August. Unfortunately, most of the blackberries are inaccessible. For some reason the children think that cutting paths into the heart of the patch with giant shears is unsporting...

Well,

No deer just now, but a stream of downy woodpeckers to the suet bars. The technical term for lots of woodpeckers is "stream" by the way.

When I was single-digit young on a couple of occassions I saw deer in the woods behind my parents' house, as I was swinging in the swing in the back yard. This was in the then largely undeveloped suburbs about 30 miles north of NYC.

For decades I never saw another one, and they became sort of an exotic memory -- as the region grew and the suburbs became *very* developed, I never thought I'd see another one.

But now they are back, and like a plague. They eat everything -- decorative plants in the front yard and off windowsills. Parents send their kids out in summer bundled up to the waist to protect against ticks and Lyme disease. Cars run into them on sidestreets, not just the highway. Deer repellant is a top selling household product.

Too much of a good thing takes the romance right out of it.

"the red deer [i.e., elk]"

Red deers and elks are quite distinct fro each other. A red deer is only half as big as an elk. And elks are brown! Ours anyway.

My faily have had elks in our garden a couple of times. My dad was chased inside the house by an angry ale once - it could have ended badly. That was after I moved out, but I did get to see a young male once. I went out, and stood three to five meters away from him.

You western nature type guys sure are super creative with your deer names, very impressive. Out here in the midwest it's just "buck", "doe", "fawn", or worse yet, the deer hunting term "antlerless".

But then our guys make up for it somewhat when we go to the deer hunting shack for an afternoon to visit they cook some really amazing dinners. You would be amazed at the cooking skills of those NRA type guys, and they don't let us wash the dishes either.

Just one more thing, I noticed you forgot to put down what are the names for the female classes of deer.

Speaking of deer mating habits, there seems to be some confusion over the relative importance of the antlers in determination of male reproductive success. Typical research answers are similar to yours, that the males that have the biggest antlers, and are the best fighters, are the winners.

Another research group says no, what really happens is that the females get tired of waiting around doing what they're biologically supposed to do (mate with the male with the most and best assets) and instead comes along an amusing, opportunistic, creative, do-nothing, scruffy, no-good male deer, and, what do you know, the female chooses him instead!

This would indicate that further study is needed, to see if research outcome is in any way biased by the type of male conducting the research, and whether the research bias is correlative or causative in nature.

Which I guess explains, on an extrapolative human level, why so many men hate being productive factory workers, and like to hunt and fish and most generally do things in the most unproductive manner possible in their free time, and thereby help out the economy by doing so!