Reader, when was the last time you saw the tail of a white-tailed deer? If you are like me, it has been a while.
Often when I am driving my son to school, I annoy him with sentences that begin, “When I was a boy. . . .” Yes, I have become that kind of a dad. One morning this week, I asked him about deer and if he had ever noticed the underside of their tails as they loped into the woods as we passed. He said he had not.
I explained that as they run away from a perceived threat, the white under-tail blaze would flash as a warning to other deer. Unscientifically, I am convinced that they no longer do this. Indeed, they really don’t seem to care about us at all.
An example: My sister lives up the Star driveway, where there is a buffer of trees and ferns between hers and the neighboring house lot. Three or four deer appear to think of this liminal space as home and seem indignant when I walk back there to work on my boat. I speak to them, not that they answer except with blank-eyed stares. I make threats; they couldn’t care less. I ask questions; they stand there. And, if they move away at all, it is at a slow walk, as if to indicate their contempt the way a teenager might shuffle off if sent to his or her room.
Along the roads it is the same thing. Most eastern Long Island drivers have at one time or another noticed groups of deer grazing along Sunrise Highway, the speed of the passing vehicles of no concern. On the back roads it is the same thing; I kept pace with a buck recently loping along Lazy Point Road at eight miles per hour, his tail down for several hundred yards until he apparently found the gap in the woods he was aiming for.
Why the threat response that gave the animal its common name has all but disappeared is something on which I can only speculate. My guess is that the tail-raising behavior is still tucked somewhere deep in their brains, but, having gotten used to us, they rarely call it up. The point is deer don’t give a whit what we humans do and that makes us all the more dangerous to them when we are behind the wheel.
Please take it slow out there, people. And, you deer, if you all are reading this, for heaven’s sake, look both ways before you cross the road, okay? Hey, deer, are you listening to me? Deer? Deer, are you not listening to me? Oh well.