204 Order ARTIODACTYLA 



The white-tail feeds on a variety of plants, including trees, 

 nibblinj:: or browsing a little on one and then on another item. 

 If the deer are too numerous in an area, they will remove all of 

 the available food they can reach, and some of them may starve 

 to death. In some places, deer do damage to gardens and to 

 orchards. 



Signs. — Prints, fig. 15, of both front and hind feet of adult 

 deer are relatively sharp pointed and usually register well when 

 the animal is walking or trotting. Tracks of running deer show- 

 prints of the clots or short hind toes on each foot, especially 

 in mud. Tracks of fawns or immature animals usually can be 

 distinguished from tracks of pigs, sheep, and goats by the more 

 acute pointedness of the footprints. 



Deer droppings are long, oval objects, commonly varying 

 from one-half to more than an inch long; generally one end is 

 tipped with a cone-shaped projection. There are usually 50 to 

 100 pellets in each set. 



Distribution. — The white-tailed deer was once common in 

 Illinois, but the native stock was exterminated during the last 

 century. In the 1930's, a concerted program of re-establishing 

 the species was undertaken, and in the winter of 1950-51 game 

 biologists estimated that there were more than 3,075 deer in 68 

 of the 102 counties of the state (Pietsch 1954:12). The intro- 

 duced deer apparently belong to the subspecies Odocoileus vir- 

 ginianus borealis Miller. The natural range of the white-tailed 

 deer includes most of North America south of an imaginary 

 line extending from Nova Scotia to southeastern British Colum- 

 bia. 



BISON BISON (Linnaeus) 

 Bison Buffalo"^ 



Description. — The bison is the only member of the bovine 

 family which was native to Illinois within historic times. This 

 animal is about the size of domestic cattle, but it appears larger 

 because of its woolly, shaggy fur, its shagg}'^ "beard," and the 

 hump betw-een its shoulders. The short horns and split hoofs 

 are black. The horns, fig. \Q^d, are ever-growing and not shed. 

 A bull weighs nearly a ton, a cow about half a ton. 



*Bison is preferable to buffalo to distinguish this mammal from the water buflalo 

 and other buffaloes of Africa and Asia. 



