The Hidden Life of Deer
Page 18
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[1] Bauer, Erwin A. Whitetails. Stillwater, Minn.: Voyageur Press, 1993, 59. We know nothing of the kind. It’s been shown definitively that the ability to reason is not related to brain size—witness Alex, Irene Pepperberg’s famous parrot who, with his walnut-sized brain, stunned the world with his cognitive abilities.
[1]Rue, Leonard Lee III. The Deer of North America. New York: Lyons and Burford, 1997, 326.
[1]Nelson, Richard. Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America. New York: Knopf, 1997, 73.
[2]The Deer of North America, p. 387.
[3]The Deer of North America, p. 461.
[1]All the other primates have hair except for newborn infants. So why are we the only ones who are naked? Some say that we are infantilized versions of our forebears, just as most domestic animals are infantilized versions of their wild ancestors. However, there may be a much better explanation. Of the 233 species of primates, only two kinds—ourselves and the baboon types—live outside the forest. When we were forced by climate change to become savannah animals we had to adapt to the broiling sun. We hunted as our primate ancestors hunted, by the chase and grab method, and as we became proficient hind-leg runners we were able to capture larger game by running the animals to exhaustion. To do this we had to withstand heat better than the game we were pursuing, and hairlessness helped us to do so. The Kalahari hunter-gatherers, most especially the Ju/wa Bushmen, hunted by running for as long as they kept the old lifestyle, even though they hunted mainly with bows and arrows.
[2]The Deer of North America, p. 332.
[3]Heart and Blood, 32.
[1]Rue, Leonard Lee III. Way of the Whitetail. Stillwater, Minn: Voyageur Press, 2000, 98.
[1]The description is from The Deer of North America, 257.
[1]The Deer of North America, 341.
[2]The Deer of North America, 342.
[3]The Deer of North America, 342.
[4]The Deer of North America, 343.
[1] Murie, Olaus J. A Field Guide to Animal Tracks, Second Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975, 2.
[2] This capable fungus is discussed in the fascinating book by Mark Plotkin, Medicine Quest: In Search of Nature’s Healing Secrets, New York: Viking, 2000. Plotkin admires Cordyceps not only for its original and highly complex reproductive strategy, but also because, as an afterthought, it makes important pharmaceuticals that benefit people, as the Chinese discovered long ago. If it didn’t benefit people, we might very well know nothing about it, as all too many living things must interface with people before we are inspired to investigate them.
[3]Sperduto, David D., William F. Nichols, Katherine F. Crowley, and Douglas A Bechted. “Black Gum (Nyssa sylvatica Marsh) in New Hampshire.” Report submitted to the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency by the New Hampshire Natural Heritage Inventory, DRED Division of Forests & Lands (Concord, NH) and the Nature Conservancy, April 2000, 6.