Breathless #1
by Wild Thing
Title
Breathless #1
Artist
Wild Thing
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
I was so caught up in the beauty of this scene, I almost forgot to take the photo! I was truly breathless at this sight. She literally glowed there in the morning sunlight. Stilled for a moment as if frozen, unaware of her graceful looks, she takes measure of me before she resumes eating the weeds around her.
White Tail Deer:
The white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), also known as the whitetail, is a medium-sized deer native to the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America as far south as Peru and Bolivia. It has also been introduced to New Zealand, Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Bermuda, Bahamas, Lesser Antilles, and some countries in Europe, such as Finland, the Czech Republic, and Serbia. In the Americas, it is the most widely distributed wild ungulate.
The deer's coat is a reddish-brown in the spring and summer and turns to a grey-brown throughout the fall and winter. The deer can be recognized by the characteristic white underside to its tail. It will raise its tail when it is alarmed to flag the other deer. A population of white-tailed deer in New York is entirely white (except for areas like their noses and toes)�not albino�in color. The former Seneca Army Depot in Romulus, New York, has the largest known concentration of white deer. Strong conservation efforts have allowed white deer to thrive within the confines of the depot. White-tailed deer's horizontally slit pupils allow for good night vision and color vision during the day.
Size and weight
The white-tailed deer is highly variable in size, generally following Bergmann's rule that the average size is larger further away from the Equator. North American male deer (also known as a buck) usually weigh 100 lbs., but in rare cases, bucks in excess of 150
lbs. have been recorded. Mature bucks over 400�lb are recorded in the northernmost reaches of their native range, specifically, Minnesota and Ontario. In 1926, Carl J. Lenander, Jr. took a white-tailed buck near Tofte, MN, that weighed 183�kg (403�lb) after it was field-dressed (internal organs removed) and was estimated at 232�kg (511�lb) when alive. The female (doe) in North America usually weighs from 40 to 90�kg (88 to 198�lb). White-tailed deer from the tropics and the Florida Keys are markedly smaller-bodied than temperate populations, averaging 35 to 50�kg (77 to 110�lb), with an occasional adult female as small as 25�kg (55�lb). White-tailed deer from the Andes are larger than other tropical deer of this species and have thick, slightly woolly looking fur. Length ranges from 95 to 220�cm (37 to 87�in), including a tail of 10 to 36.5�cm (3.9 to 14.4�in), and the shoulder height is 53 to 120�cm (21 to 47�in). Including all races, the average summer weight of adult males is 68�kg (150�lb) and is 45.3�kg (100�lb) in adult females.
Deer have dichromatic (two-color) vision with blue and yellow primaries; humans have trichromatic vision. Thus, deer poorly distinguish the oranges and reds that stand out so well to humans. This makes it very convenient to use deer-hunter orange as a safety color on caps and clothing to avoid accidental shootings during hunting seasons.
Antlers
Males regrow their antlers every year. About one in 10,000 females also have antlers, although this is usually associated with hermaphroditism. Bucks without branching antlers are often termed "spikehorn", "spiked bucks", "spike bucks", or simply "spikes". The spikes can be quite long or very short. Length and branching of antlers are determined by nutrition, age, and genetics. Rack growth tends to be very important from late spring until about a month before velvet sheds. During this time, damage done to the racks tends to be permanent. Healthy deer in some areas that are well-fed can have eight-point branching antlers as yearlings (1.5 years old). The number of points, the length, or thickness of the antlers is a general indication of age, but cannot be relied upon for positive aging. A better indication of age is the length of the snout and the color of the coat, with older deer tending to have longer snouts and grayer coats. Some say spiked-antler deer should be culled from the population to produce larger branching antler genetics (antler size does not indicate overall health), and some bucks' antlers never will be wall trophies. Good antler-growth nutritional needs (calcium) and good genetics combine to produce wall trophies in some of their range. Spiked bucks are different from "button bucks" or "nubbin' bucks", that are male fawns and are generally about six to nine months of age during their first winter. They have skin-covered nobs on their heads. They can have bony protrusions up to a half inch in length, but that is very rare, and they are not the same as spikes.
Antlers begin to grow in late spring, covered with a highly vascularised tissue known as velvet. Bucks either have a typical or atypical antler arrangement. Typical antlers are symmetrical and the points grow straight up off the main beam. Atypical antlers are asymmetrical and the points may project at any angle from the main beam. These descriptions are not the only limitations for typical and atypical antler arrangement. The Boone and Crockett or Pope and Young scoring systems also define relative degrees of typicality and atypicality by procedures to measure what proportion of the antlers are asymmetrical. Therefore, bucks with only slight asymmetry are scored as "typical". A buck's inside spread can be from 3 to 25�in (8�64�cm). Bucks shed their antlers when all females have been bred, from late December to February.
Uploaded
October 12th, 2015
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