White-tailed Deer

Description:

White-tailed deer vary in size across their range with the smallest subspecies living in southern Florida and ranging to animals that on the average are twice that size in the northern part of their range. They are reddish brown in the summer and tend toward gray/brown in the winter. Males are larger than females and have forked antlers that are shed and regrown annually.

Habitat:

Forested areas of North America, but ranging as far south as northern South America. Increasingly common in suburban areas.

Notes:

In some areas, shed antlers are important calcium resources for rodents that need the calcium to either help form the bones of developing fetuses or to replenish the calcium withdrawn from the bones of the mothers that formed the bones of their young. I fastened a shed antler to a tree log but nothing gnawed on it until the first rodent young of the year were born. That makes me think it is a replenishment of the mother's bones, but that was a simple, one time experiment and it may have been that rodents simply hadn't found the antler.