By now, hunters around the Northeast are counting the days until (deer hunting) rifle season. In the spirit of the season, we thought we’d share this series of pictures that we took on the evening of September 25.
We set a camera up at the edge of a farm field near the office, where the deer had been entering to eat apples from a few wild trees nearby. A week earlier, an acquaintance of ours had hit a young buck with his truck, and the deer's antlers were still covered in summer velvet. During the velvety summer days, bucks are generally cordial creatures who often hang out in bachelor groups – they’ll even groom ticks off each other. But as the days shorten, the bucks get a surge of testosterone and the velvet disappears, as does the cordial behavior.
The pictures you see here were taken around 4:30 in the morning. The camera was set on a .10 second delay, and the fight lasted 163 frames. Look closely at the picture and you can see the bucks’ hair standing on end (called piloerection by mammologists), the ears pinned back. You can image them flaring their nostrils; there was probably intense drooling. This is all classic dominance-dispute behavior.
While the fight looks intense – there may be some blood trickling down the one buck’s forehead in one picture – it was probably mostly sport. Bucks establish dominance hierarchies, and so these two equally sized deer were figuring out who was physically superior before the rut got under way in earnest. Once the pecking order is established, the bucks will be able to minimize aggression during the breeding season, when energy is better spent trying to breed does and avoid hunters.
