May and June are important months in the life of white-tailed deer.
That’s when does give birth to fawns, start nursing them and begin mentoring them.
Autumn is also an important time in the life of whitetails. It’s when their annual mating season commences, when does go into estrus, and pair up with bucks for breeding.
Deer have always been present in Kentucky.
The first long hunters, explorers and land speculators who ventured west of the Appalachians in the 18th century found a land that was rich in natural resources — streams and rivers, vast forests, wetlands and wildlife.
There were thundering herds of bison, black bears, wolves, woodland elk, and white-tailed deer in seemingly every forest opening. Frontier hunters harvested deer for their skins to make chaps and clothing, and relished venison backstraps and hams cooked over open fires.
But more than a century of habitat destruction and subsistence hunting by 19th century settlers took its toll on local herds. Deer numbers crashed. By 1915 deer were absent from most of Kentucky, except for remnant herds in a handful of counties in western Kentucky.
It would be 84 years before deer restoration efforts would be complete in all 120 Kentucky counties.
Deer trapping and relocation began in 1947, and continued into the 1990s. In March 1999, deer restoration ended with the release of the final load of deer in Perry County. After 52 years, 10,096 white-tailed deer were trapped and re-located around the state.
That fall, for the first time in decades, all 120 counties in Kentucky were open to deer hunting.
While some of the deer released in Kentucky’s restocking efforts came from out-of-state sources, including Michigan, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, the overwhelming majority were translocated from in-state trap sites, and their lineage ultimately traces back to early 20th century remnant deer populations in Caldwell, Christian, Lyon, and Trigg Counties.
Native range and introductions
The white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) was first described in the scientific literature in 1780 by German zoologist August Wilhelm von Zimmermann. There are 26 subspecies, 17 in North America.
In North America, the white-tailed deer is common in states to the east and south of the Rocky Mountains.
Texas is home to the most white-tailed deer in all U.S. states, with an estimated population of 5.3 million, both wild deer and farmed herds.
High populations of white-tailed deer are also present in Michigan, Alabama, Mississippi, Wisconsin and Missouri.
Globally, the white-tailed deer has been introduced into New Zealand, the Caribbean countries of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, and some countries in Europe, including the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Romania and Serbia.
Size and descriptions
The white-tailed deer’s coat is a reddish-brown in the spring and summer, and turns to a grey-brown in the fall and winter. Their undersides are white to their tails. Whitetails raise their tails when alarmed. Older deer tend to have longer snouts and grayer coats.
The white-tailed deer’s horizontally slit pupil allows for good night vision and color vision during the day. Whitetails process visual images at a much more rapid rate than humans and are better at detecting motion in low-light conditions.
The white-tailed deer is highly variable in size, depending on its range. Mature bucks are usually weigh 150 to 300 pounds.
A female — or doe — in North America usually weighs from 88 to 198 pounds. White-tailed deer from the tropics and the Florida Keys are markedly smaller-bodied than temperate populations, averaging 77 to 110 pounds, with an occasional adult female as small as 55 pounds.
Deer have dichromatic (two-color) vision, Humans normally have trichromatic vision. Thus, deer poorly distinguish the oranges and reds that stand out so well to humans.
This means hunter orange is effective as a safety color on caps and clothing to avoid accidental shootings during hunting seasons.
Reproduction
Females enter estrus, normally beginning in late October, triggered mainly by the declining photoperiod. Sexual maturation of females depends on population density, as well as the availability of food.
Young females often flee from an area heavily populated with males. Some does may be as young as six months when they reach sexual maturity, but the average age of maturity is 18 months.
Females give birth to one to three spotted fawns in mid-to-late spring, generally in May or June. Fawns lose their spots during the first summer and weigh from 44 to 77 pounds, by the first winter.
Male fawns tend to be slightly larger and heavier than females.
For the first four weeks, fawns are hidden in vegetation by their mothers, who nurse them four to five times a day. This strategy keeps scent levels low to avoid predators. After about a month, the fawns are then able to follow their mothers on foraging trips. They are usually weaned after 8 to 10 weeks, but mothers have continued to allow nursing long after the fawns have lost their spots. Males leave their mothers after a year and females leave after two.
Bucks are generally sexually mature at 1 1/2 years old and begin to breed even in populations stacked with older bucks.
U.S. population status
By the early 20th century, commercial exploitation and unregulated hunting had severely depressed deer populations in much of their range. In 1930, the U.S. population was thought to number about 300,000.
When the commercial exploitation of deer (selling venison taken from wild sources) became illegal, and conservation programs and regulated hunting were introduced, deer numbers rebounded.
By 2005, estimates put the deer population in its native range in the Lower 48 States at around 30 million. By 2023 our herds had swelled to 35 million.
White-tailed deer will always be a part of our landscape, a reminder of our pioneer past, and one of our greatest conservation success stories.