280 EXTINCT AND VANISHING MAMMALS 



near settlements. He was told that at that time they were 

 found only in the rougher parts of the Badlands, where a few 

 may still persist, "but, if not already extinct, this finest of all 

 native species of the smaller deer will soon have vanished from 

 the State" (Bailey, 1926). They are apparently rare also in 

 South Dakota. 



There were mule deer in Nebraska in the seventies, but their 

 numbers have been much reduced, and from Kansas they are 

 quite gone. At the end of the last century a few existed in the 

 open northwest corner of Minnesota, from Red Lake to Lake 

 of the Woods, but they were exterminated soon after. In 1911 

 Gary wrote that "apparently none remain on the plains east 

 of the mountains" in Colorado, "where they were common in 

 early times." The mule deer of the mountainous areas here 

 are perhaps of the race macrotis, although, as Bailey says, so 

 few specimens of the typical plains form are in existence that 

 we may never know its precise characters. 



In the 1939 estimate of game animals by the U. S. Biological 

 Survey, the following figures are given for the mule deer in the 

 States east of the Rockies where it formerly was found: 

 Oklahoma, none; Kansas, none; [eastern Colorado, gone;] 

 Nebraska, 350; South Dakota, 4,900; North Dakota, 100; 

 Minnesota, none. Although the basis of the figures for South 

 Dakota is not given, it is likely that their center is in the 

 Black Hills region, now a national park. Here Dr. Walter 

 Granger reported them "numerous" in 1895 although "about 

 extinct in the Bad Lands" (see J. A. Allen, 1895). With 

 strict protection it seems likely that they might be permanently 

 preserved in such areas as parts of the Badlands afford, with 

 due consideration of the fact that they are wont to move down 

 from the higher hills in autumn to winter in the more sheltered 

 places of the lowlands. 



WHITE-TAILED DEER; VIRGINIA DEER 



ODOCOILEUS VIRGINIANUS VIRGINIANUS (Zimmermann) 



Dama virginiana Zimmermann, Specimen Zoologiae Geogr., p. 351, 1777 ("America," 



assumed to be Virginia). 

 FIGS.: Elliot, 1901, pi. 15 (skull), as 0. americanus; Nelson, 1916, p. 458, upper fig. 



(col.). 



The white-tailed deer is found in woodlands of the temperate 



