Blacktail deer and mule deer are the same species — Odocoileus hemionus — but they are far from identical. Blacktails (the Columbian black-tailed deer and the Sitka black-tailed deer) are compact, dark-coated subspecies of the Pacific coast rainforests, while the
Yes — deer eat strawberries, and not just the fruit. Deer browse the whole plant: tender spring leaves, blossoms, runners, and every ripe berry they can find. A low, open strawberry patch is one of the easiest meals in the
Yes — deer eat ivy, and English ivy in particular is browsed far more often than its reputation suggests. Despite mildly toxic leaves, ivy is evergreen, abundant, and available at nose height all winter, which makes it a regular fallback
An adult moose typically weighs between about 600 and 1,500 pounds (roughly 270 to 700 kilograms), with bulls generally weighing 840 to 1,500 pounds and cows 440 to 1,080 pounds. Exactly where a moose falls in that range depends on
Fawns have white spots for one main reason: camouflage. A newborn fawn cannot outrun a coyote or a bobcat, so its survival depends on not being seen at all. The pattern of white spots scattered across a reddish-brown coat mimics
Caribou live across the northern regions of North America — Alaska, much of Canada, and parts of Greenland — in Arctic tundra, boreal forest (taiga), and northern mountain ranges. The same species, called reindeer in Europe and Asia, also lives
An adult elk typically stands around 4.5 to 5 feet tall at the shoulder and measures 6.5 to 8.5 feet from nose to tail. Mature bulls usually weigh around 700 to 1,100 pounds, while cows are smaller at roughly 500
Antlers and horns are completely different structures: antlers are solid bone, grown fresh every year and shed every winter, and they belong only to the deer family — deer, elk, moose, and caribou. Horns are permanent — a bony core
The animals that truly hibernate include ground squirrels, groundhogs, chipmunks, hedgehogs, bats, and one remarkable primate — while bears do something related but gentler, and deer don’t hibernate at all. True hibernation is far stranger than a long nap: a
A group of deer is a herd, a group of wolves is a pack, a group of owls is a parliament, and a group of crows is — really — a murder. Collective nouns are one of the English language’s
A baby deer is a fawn, a baby bear is a cub, a baby kangaroo is a joey, a baby fox is a kit, and a baby goat is a kid — and that’s just the beginning. English has a
The smartest animal in the world, by most scientific measures, is the chimpanzee — our closest living relative, a toolmaker with culture, politics, and a photographic short-term memory that beats most humans. But intelligence isn’t a single ladder, and depending
The loudest animal in the world is the sperm whale, whose echolocation clicks have been measured at up to about 230 decibels underwater — the most intense sound produced by any living creature. On land, the title usually goes to
The longest-living animal ever reliably dated was an ocean quahog clam named Ming, which was 507 years old when scientists counted its shell rings in 2013. Among vertebrates, the champion is the Greenland shark: a 2016 study estimated one large
The strongest animal in the world, relative to its size, is a dung beetle: the horned dung beetle Onthophagus taurus can pull about 1,141 times its own body weight — the equivalent of a person dragging six fully loaded double-decker
The biggest animal in the world — and the largest animal known to have ever lived — is the blue whale. The longest individuals reliably measured stretched up to about 98 feet, and the heaviest weighed as much as roughly
The fastest animal in the world is the peregrine falcon, which reaches speeds of more than 200 miles per hour — up to about 240 mph — in its hunting dive. On land, the record-holder is the cheetah, with reliably
Z is the final letter of the animal alphabet, and one animal owns it: the zebra. But Z has more to offer than stripes — there is a humped ox sacred in parts of South Asia, an African “skunk” that
Y is a quieter letter of the animal alphabet, but it has real star power: a shaggy ox that thrives higher than most airplanes cruise on takeoff, a whistling “rock woodchuck” of the American West, one of the rarest penguins
X is the hardest letter in the entire animal alphabet — and this page will be honest with you about it. Only a handful of animals have common names that truly begin with X, and most of those borrow from
W is a wild letter. It owns the largest animal that has ever lived (the blue whale), one of the smallest carnivores on Earth (the least weasel), the howling icon of the wilderness (the wolf), and a marsupial that produces
V is a small but dramatic letter. It brings us the only mammals that live entirely on blood, the rarest marine mammal on Earth, a wild relative of the alpaca with the finest wool in the world, and a backyard
U is a genuinely tricky letter — there are far fewer U animals than S or T animals, and some lists pad themselves out with made-up names. Not here. Every animal below is real, from a bald-headed monkey with a
T stands for tiger — the biggest cat on Earth — but that is only the beginning. This letter also delivers a screaming marsupial from Tasmania, a deer with vampire-like fangs, a high-altitude deer of the Andes, tortoises that outlive