the three-minute outdoorsman

5
it’s taken centuries, but we now know
why deer don’t ask to use your compass
Natural history is about learning basic facts about plants and
animals, where they occur, what they do, how they interact, and
so on. Many scientific journals are devoted to reporting obser-
vations that scientists make about natural history. The public,
however, sometimes does not fully understand what “natural his-
tory” entails—as the editor of one prominent journal reported
after receiving a letter requesting a list of nude beaches in a Latin
America country.
At one time I would have wagered that we have missed rela-
tively few “obvious” things that occur in nature. We know about
migration, hibernation, what habitat birds use, who eats whom,
who’s the fastest, and so on. But not all things can be observed
with the unaided eye, and some things that animals do require
sophisticated technology for us to see or understand them.
For example, in the past twenty years we have learned that
many birds have a well-developed ability to see in the ultravio-
let (UV) part of the light spectrum. And scientific experiments
have now well established that birds communicate visually with
patches of UV plumage, which we simply cannot see. We miss
much of what birds are telling each other because we are blind to
the signals.
Still, you would think that something basic, something that
can be observed with the unaided eye, would not have escaped
centuries of observations. Right? Apparently we have missed
something. It was reported by Sabine Begall (from Essen, Ger-
many) and colleagues Jaroslav Ćervený, Julia Neef, Oldřich
Vojtěch, and Hynek Burda in one of the most prestigious scien-
tific journals, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
But before I give it away, here’s some background.

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 all things deer

Ranchers have known for a long time that most sheep and
cattle in a group face the same way when grazing. Farmers know
that cattle usually face into the wind, whereas sheep face away
from it. When it is cold and the sun is out, you’ll probably see
grazing animals orient perpendicular to the sun to absorb the
most solar radiation. On a cold, windy winter’s day, you’ll most
likely see cows (and hence the whole herd) orient themselves into
a strong wind, exposing the least amount of body surface area.
These behaviors occur in stressful conditions. But what hap-
pens when conditions are not particularly stressful? One would
think that the direction of body orientation would be random. Yet
we now know that cows and two kinds of deer in Europe (red and
roe) orient themselves very strongly in a north–south direction in
nonstressful conditions! No way, how could we have missed this?
How Begall and her colleagues figured this out is pretty cool
to say the least. Believe it or not, they said they looked at maps on
Google Earth and that they could see cows in pastures and deter-
mine which direction they were facing. I was skeptical, so I asked
Begall to send me coordinates so I could see for myself—they
weren’t kidding!
Try it yourself by visiting Google Earth and entering
36º58′57.57″ S, 61º42′11.55″ W. Sure enough you can see a herd of
cows in an Argentine pasture oriented north–south, from space!
They actually used images like this to figure out which way the
cattle were standing.
Begall and colleagues reasoned that because their images
were from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North and South
America, and Australia, it was unlikely that the wind and sun
were the same in all places and that these could not explain the
consistent north–south body orientation. They concluded that
cattle were using the earth’s magnetic field. We do know that lots
of animals, like birds, use magnetic lines of force to navigate. Now
we know that cattle and deer also can sense magnetic lines of force
and use them to orient themselves.
But wait, you say, what about deer? Well, they have field

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 the three-minute outdoorsman

observations (not satellite) of roe deer and red deer in the Czech
Republic. They found that both resting and grazing deer tend
strongly to orient in a north–south direction.
Even more impressive, they examined deer beds in the snow,
finding again a very strong north–south orientation! They also
concluded that resting roe deer not only oriented themselves
north–south but also almost always oriented their heads to point
north. Somewhat comforting to the natural historian in me was
the observation that in herds of grazing red deer, about one-third
of the animals were oriented south, which they figured was an
antipredator behavior. So, it’s not all or none.
Their observations certainly raise some questions. I would
think that resting deer would orient into the wind to detect
approaching predators. However, the authors concluded that at
least at night, bedded roe deer and red deer are deep in forests,
where wind is damped and hearing becomes the main defense.
The obvious overarching question is, why? The authors also
recognized this but could only make some suggestions. Perhaps
maintaining a certain magnetic orientation provides a directional
reference for the animals in case they are disturbed, the herd scat-
ters, and they need to know which way to go to regroup as quickly
as possible.
The authors point out that the phenomenon requires more
study, but one cannot help being awed by their ending comment:
“It is amazing that this ubiquitous conspicuous phenomenon
apparently has remained unnoticed by herdsmen and hunters for
thousands of years.”
Ouch, that hurts the natural historian in me. But when we
cease being amazed by nature, I guess it would stop being fun. So,
now when we see whitetails feeding in nonstressful conditions
and we find beds in the winter, we should record whether they
are indeed oriented in a north–south direction. Remember, it’s
not likely all or none, but it would be interesting to know if North
American deer also show a strong tendency to orient north–south.
But there’s a potential catch. The researchers found that the direc-

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 all things deer

tion of orientation followed the magnetic north, which can be dif-

ferent from simple geographic north (in Minnesota, we’re a few
degrees off).

6
why are medical researchers
interested in antlers?
During a recent autumn, I occasionally saw a year-and-a-half-old
buck with Y-shaped antlers (a four pointer) on each side as he
walked by my trail camera. The last time I saw him he had shed
one side. I found the other side while I was taking a break from
writing this very article. It had been dropped in the previous
twelve hours.
Wondering what is known about antlers, I did some dig-
ging in the antler literature and found that the medical profession
admires them for entirely different reasons than hunters do. Limb
regeneration is their interest. Yes, antlers are a lot like limbs.
Among the vertebrates, creatures like salamanders retain the
ability to regenerate tails and limbs throughout life. That is a use-
ful trick if some predator grabs your tail—better to give it up and
live on with a newly regenerated one. Humans actually have some
limited capability to regenerate tips of fingers, but it depends on
how the wound is treated after losing a terminal segment. But the
power to regenerate is pretty limited in other vertebrates, espe-
cially mammals.
With one big exception, antlers. The annual regrowth of ant-
lers proves that mammals are not incapable of limb regeneration,
but it doesn’t occur, except for antlers. In a 2010 scientific paper in
the journal Gerontology, Uwe Kierdorf and Horst Kierdorf wrote,
“Understanding the mechanisms controlling antler regeneration
may thus assist regenerative medicine to achieve its ultimate, but

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