White Tailed Deer, Ohio in album Ohio
Jun 14th, 2003, by Alex Zorach
This photo shows a white-tailed deer in Ohio. This photo is either in or near the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, I don't know the exact boundaries, but it's in that general area. The sign reads Stanford House, AYH Hostel; I stayed in this house on a trip with some people. The trail sign shows the intersection of Valley Bridle Trail and Towpath Trail.
There were quite a few deer in this area, mostly walking on or around the roads; I did not see any in the more wild parts of the park, but I saw numerous ones while driving on the way out. This is actually typical: deer like lush, tender vegetation low to the ground, which tends to grow in more exposed, sunny areas, and the edges of roads produce ideal habitat for deer. This, in turn, is problematic, as the deer are hazardous to motorists...hitting a deer at even moderate speeds can cause considerable damage to a car. Deer also tend not to be particularly afraid of cars, and sometimes stop in the road. They also do not have a particularly good instinct for jumping to the side of the road, which makes some sense, as in their evolutionary history they only had to deal with predators who would pursue them directly; fleeing in a perpendicular (side) direction would thus have been maladaptive. So, we humans are stuck for now with deer that wander into the road and don't get out of it when we come along in our cars.
The tree in the upper right of this photo is not native: it is a Norway maple. I think that the tree on the left is a box-elder, a native species of maple.