A Year of Deer: Whitetail Biology in the Springtime

It’s June and deer season is still months away! Just because you’re not spending all your time in a tree stand doesn’t mean you’re not thinking about deer. After all, what the deer are doing right now will affect your hunting this fall and for years to come. Springtime is a vital period in a whitetail’s life cycle.

Early spring, most notably the month of March, is the most challenging time for adult whitetail survival. Winter fat reserves are limited at this point of the year, so deer can be nutritionally stressed in the time leading up to new spring vegetation emergence. Fawns born to does with poor body condition have a higher mortality rate than fawns born to healthy, well-conditioned does. Once deer survive that difficult late-winter period, what’s going on in the springtime whitetail woods?

Does and Fawns

              Deer breed in the fall when the photoperiod is short. Does are polyestrous, meaning that if they do not become pregnant during their first estrous period, they will come into estrous again approximately 28 days later. Most does are bred in a close window of time, which serves several purposes. After a 200 day gestation period, fawns are born when vegetation is tall and thick enough to provide good cover for the stationary newborns. With this thick cover comes plenty of nutritional resources for adult does to maintain a healthy body condition and produce nutrient-rich milk for their fawns. Fawns born too early have less cover and their mothers have fewer nutritional resources, while fawns born too late will be smaller and younger than the rest of their cohort heading into winter, which is also challenging.

 Another biological benefit to having a peak breeding season and, in turn, peak fawning time, is that the landscape becomes “saturated” with fawns. The idea is that predators have an easy time picking off individual fawns to snack on when the newborns are too young to run away and escape. But on the population level, if the majority of fawns are born at once, predators will be satiated by a portion of the total fawns on the landscape, leaving others to survive the early vulnerable stage. Besides predators, other major causes of fawn mortality include human-caused from machinery or vehicles, and malnutrition due to poor maternal body condition.

Fawns are born with a spotted coat to mimic the dappled light shining through tree leaves to optimize camouflage. In the springtime, adult deer undergo coat changes as well, shedding their gray winter coat comprised of long guard hairs and a dense undercoat into a reddish colored summer coat of guard hairs. For the first few weeks of a fawn’s life, its mother hides it in cover and spends her time away from her fawn, visiting it throughout the day to nurse it.

For most of the year, female whitetails are social animals, spending time in matrilineal groups of a doe, her female offspring and their offspring. However, when it is time for giving birth, does become territorial and establish individual territories in which to maintain their newborn fawn. As the summer progresses, does once again become more social and return to groups along with their young of the year.

Bucks

              While bucks don’t have to maintain body condition to produce milk for fawns, they do have to acquire enough nutrients to maintain another growing tissue: antlers. As the photoperiod increases, testosterone production in bucks also increases and triggers antler growth. Springtime nutrition is important for bucks to intake sufficient minerals to support this tissue growth. Velvet antlers grow at a very high rate compared to most animal tissues. By the time July and August roll around, the majority of growth is complete and the antlers mineralize into hard bone going into the fall breeding season.

              Unlike does, which establish separate territories from other does in the spring, bucks become more social this time of year. Bucks establish bachelor groups of animals that spend time feeding and bedding together in the summer, as aggressive behavior is much less frequent than in the fall. Dispersal of yearling bucks, recently driven away by their mothers, also occurs during this time of year. For bucks, summer is a time for maximizing nutrition and building the necessary fat storage to survive the winter and have a successful breeding season.

Conclusion

              Many whitetail biological processes are driven by photoperiod, and the lengthening days and increased forage availability allows for some of the most important reproductive and rebuilding periods of a whitetail’s annual life cycle. While you might not be spending as much time in the deer woods in June, the deer are raising future Booner’s and putting on antler mass that will definitely be noticed in the fall.

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