Nature, red in tooth and claw

"Nature, red in tooth and claw" is a quote from a poem written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1850 which aptly describes the competition and predation occurring in the natural world.

Those of you who regularly visit In Forest and Field have seen several examples: A peregrine falcon feeding on a pigeon, a great horned owl with a rabbit, a white-tail doe nibbling on a dead fawn, eastern coyotes feeding on a road-killed deer.

Recently I checked a camera trap on the hill above the house and found that it had videos of an eastern coyote as it attacked a yearling white-tailed deer with a broken right front leg. There’s no obvious wound to the deer, so it appears that the leg had been broken previously; perhaps caught between rocks or logs, struck by a vehicle or …

Predators prefer to attack sick, old, very young or injured prey since that saves energy and lessens the chance of injury if the prey fights back. In this case the deer’s right front leg appears to be useless, just dangling as the deer tries to avoid the coyote.

The coyote repeated circled the deer, trying to exhaust it or looking for an opening –

Toward the end of the video the deer was hidden by the large shrub, so the outcome was a mystery.

The next day I took the memory card from another camera trap in the same general area – it had more videos of the deer and the coyote, but they were again partially hidden by vegetation –

In this video it looks like there were two eastern coyotes attacking the deer but in the end it appears that the coyotes gave up and left – the deer still alive.

There’s abundant research demonstrating that predators are only successful in about 10% of their attacks on prey species. A white-tailed deer, even when severely injured, is a large and formidable animal when fighting for it’s life. This yearling white-tail may well survive as illustrated by a buck with a somewhat similar injury that was repeatedly caught on camera.