I’m proud to say that a young beauty made eyes at me yesterday, as you can see:
She also made ears and a nose at me and even gave me a come-on Mona Lisa smile:, but don’t tell my wife about this:
Of course, the senses of white-tailed deer are made for more important stuff than attracting admiring old men. The deer are major prey and they have major sensual organs to help even the odds. Form very much follows function in these deer, according to research that I’ve read, some of which is summarized here.
The pupils in white-tail deer eyes are, proportionately, 10 times larger than human pupils and can help provide extraordinary sight in low light. The eyes are angled so that the deer have a 310-degree field of vision, compared to our 180-degree field.
The ears also are proportionately enormous and can be rotated independently and almost 180 degrees. They’ll often move around in different directions like two radar disks while the deer’s head and body are still.
A white-tail’s nose (“olfactory bulb”) follows the same pattern. It’s about four times larger than the average human nose and can have up to 297 million scent receptors compared to our 5 million and dogs’ average pf 220 million. The deers’ sense of smell is estimated to be nearly one-third better than that of wild and domestic canines. Both deer and canines have moist snouts to catch the tiniest of scent molecules and dissolve them for receptor cell analysis.
(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on May 23, 2024.)