By now you’ve probably seen the video of a whitetail doe eating and inhaling lengthwise a 2-foot-long snake. The video, taken by Trey Reinhart with his phone while driving along a road in Texas, has gone viral on Twitter with more than 18 million views. Wait, aren’t deer herbivore? Plant-eaters? Yes, and while it’s rare, a deer will sometimes eat animals or animal matter that it runs across. Most documented cases of carnivorous meals have been deer eating the eggs from a bird’s ground nest. Deer have also been know to eat tiny songbird chicks. A few years back, a photo of a deer standing in a creek with a fish in its mouth went viral. I read where some [...]

In the springs of 2016 and 2017, Justin Dion and his fellow researchers at the University of Delaware captured and collared 109 newborn fawns in Sussex County in the southern portion of the state. The study area had about 50 deer per square mile, but a noticeable lack of predators. No confirmed sightings of bobcats and no bears. Only 9 coyotes had ever been reported harvested statewide in Delaware at the time of the project. Each of the 109 collared fawns was monitored daily. When a fawn died, the researchers investigated the scene, collected data and sent the carcass to a veterinarian for necropsy. After crunching the numbers, Dion and crew reported that only 49 of the 109 fawns they [...]