Deer are awesome. Humans savor them as food, find aesthetic pleasure in their appearance, and have even worshiped them as gods. Deer hunting is or has been practiced in almost every nation and culture, ranging from the sport of kings to staple-food subsistence. Venison is not only delicious, but also one of the leanest and most nutritious kinds of meat available to humans.
Deer are also attracted to humans. Most deer species prefer to feed on plants with high nutritional value. These plants often grow in young, freshly changed landscapes, that often emerge after forest fires, logging, or when abandoned farmland gets overgrown. No wonder you can see deer near human settlements – sometimes right inside towns and cities!
Deer are an indispensable element of American life. But do you know how many kinds of deer are there in North America? Test yourself:
- A: 3
- B: 6
- C: 58
- D: 80
Take your pick.
Congratulations! You are correct!
What? — I hear you say — But you can’t possibly know my answer! How can you tell if I’m right or wrong? Is it some kind of IT trickery?
No, not quite. The answer to the question “How many kinds of deer are there in North America?” depends on how you define “deer,” how you define “kind,” and whether you are asking a hunter, a biologist, or a trophy-record book. Let’s see how it works out.
The Tale of Tails: White-tailed, Mule, and Black-Tailed Deer
In Britain and elsewhere in Europe, when someone says “deer” they usually mean the red stag. In America, the default “deer” is the whitetail, or one of its close relatives: the mule deer and the black-tailed deer.
That’s easy to explain. These three species are not only apparently omnipresent, they are also as native as can be. The moose, the elk (wapiti), the caribou (reindeer) all have family in the Old World, but neither the whitetail nor the mule nor the black-tailed deer could boast of having a closely related species in Europe or Asia. A wild population of white-tailed deer does exist in Finland, but it stems from animals introduced in the 1920s. All in all, they are as American as the Grand Canyon or Ford Mustang.
The relationship between these deer is so complicated, they could’ve been characters in a Mexican telenovela. According to the traditional classification, the white-tailed deer and the mule deer are separate species. The black-tailed deer is usually treated as a subspecies, or a coastal group, of the mule deer. Genetic studies, however, have complicated this neat picture.
Early analysis of mitochondrial DNA (the part of the genome inherited through the mother) suggested that the white-tailed deer might have evolved first, as far back as 3.5 million years ago. That would make it the oldest extant deer species overall. Then, as the ice ages came and went, a part of its population got isolated on the Pacific coast and evolved into the black-tailed deer. Then, as the ice caps retreated, the black-tailed spread into the mainland, hybridized with whitetails, and the mule deer evolved out of the mix.
As the new data comes in, even this story begins to sound like oversimplification. It doesn’t explain, for example, why mule deer and blacktails readily mate, while hybrids between whitetails and mulies are rare in the wild (but they do exist – see below!). In any case, for all the history of ancient contact and gene flow between the species, the white-tailed deer, the mule deer, and the black-tailed deer have distinct and recognizable lineages.
For the purpose of our story, we’ll write down that the first and simplest answer is three: white-tailed deer, mule deer, and black-tailed deer, the All-American Trio.
Tails, Heads, and Antlers: How to Tell the Difference Between Whitetail, Mule Deer and Black-tailed Deer
It’s essential to know the difference between these kinds of deer, especially where you can meet two of them but legally hunt only one.
Whitetails and Mule Deer
Whitetails and mule deer ranges overlap in many parts of the United States, Canada and Mexico. Fortunately, they’re relatively easy to tell apart, and every experienced hunter knows how.
You can start with the part of the white-tailed deer’s body that gave it its name. An escaping whitetail raises its tail and shows a bright flag of white fur, used as an alarm signal to other deer. Mule deer don’t have anything quite so flashy. The underside of a mule deer tail is more beige or creamy than bright white, and the tail is usually longer and narrower than a whitetail’s, with a black tip.
When the animals are not alarmed, it’s the head that you should focus on. Mule deer can be recognized by the large ears that earned them their name — to early European settlers, they resembled those of a mule. A mule deer’s face also shows a bit more pale coloration than a whitetail’s.
Antlers differ, too. Whitetail antlers usually grow from one main beam, with points rising from it, like the teeth of a comb. Mule deer antlers typically fork: each beam divides, and then the forks may divide again. However, deer grow so many typical and atypical antler forms that identification by antlers alone is not always reliable.
The species also differ in behavior, partly because they often prefer different landscapes. Whitetails are more creatures of cover and edge habitat. Mule deer tend to favor more open, broken country — although, as always with wildlife, there are exceptions. Behavior and communication during the rut also differ, which may help explain why they seldom interbreed in the wild despite overlapping ranges. Finally, an unmistakable mule deer trait is the stot — a characteristic bounding gait in which all four feet hit the ground almost together.
Mule Deer and Blacktails
Telling a mule deer from a blacktail is a different story. Blacktails are generally smaller and darker, and they dwell in the coastal Pacific Northwest and coastal Alaska, while mule deer tend to be larger and occupy drier, more open country east of the main coastal ranges. Their behavior is similar, and the two can intergrade where their ranges meet.
The most visible external clue is the tail: a mule deer has a pale tail with a black tip, while a Columbian blacktail’s tail is mostly black along the upper surface. Sitka blacktails can be subtler, with a smaller, darker tail and much less white in the rump. Fortunately, these deer only overlap in limited contact
Beyond Whitetail: Other Members of the Deer Family
The “default” deer for English-speaking North Americans are whitetails, black-tailed deer, and mule deer. But the deer family doesn’t end there. Caribou are deer. Elk are deer. Heck, even moose are deer! And in Mexico and Central America, we find the brocket deer, small tropical cervids whose males wear short, unbranched antlers.
The bigger deer family is grouped into two sub-families. Whitetails, mule deer, blacktails, moose, caribou, and brocket deer all belong to the subfamily Capreolinae, also known as “New World deer.” That name is a little misleading, because moose and caribou are also found, or have close counterparts, in the Old World. Still, it describes the main evolutionary group.
Read our blog to learn more about these amazing animals.
Elk stand apart. Evolutionary, it is related to, but distinct from, the European red deer. Together with red deer, sika, sambar, barasingha and others, elk belong to the subfamily Cervinae, or “Old World deer.” The species likely originated in the region known as Beringia, which used to join Alaska and Northeastern Asia, and several Asian deer such as the maral are classified as wapiti. The elk didn’t appear in the mainland US and Canada until some 10,000 years ago, but it doesn’t prevent them from being one of the great native game animals of North America.
So, if we count mule deer and black-tailed deer as one biological species, the brocket deer also as one (its taxonomy is highly disputable anyway), and then add white-tailed deer, elk, caribou, and moose, we work the number of North American deer kinds up to six!
Digging Deeper: Deer Subspecies
This is where the ground starts to move under your feet. Older field guides and classic hunting literature often recognize two subspecies of black-tailed deer — Columbian and Sitka — and several subspecies of mule deer, including names such as California, Cedros Island, desert or burro, southern mule deer, Rocky Mountain, Inyo, peninsular or Baja, and Tiburón Island.
Click to learn more about the Nomads of the North
More recent work is less generous with names. Some contemporary summaries recognize only a handful of well-supported mule deer and blacktail subspecies: Sitka blacktail, Columbian blacktail, Tiburón Island mule deer, Cedros Island mule deer, and the main continental mule deer. Mainland labels such as Rocky Mountain, California, desert, or Inyo mule deer can still be useful to hunters and wildlife managers, but many scientists would treat several of them as regional ecotypes rather than strong subspecies.
White-tailed deer subspecies are even more numerous and even more debatable. At one point, biologists recognized almost as many varieties as Heinz tomato sauce. Modern genetic work has forced many people to be more cautious, but traditional lists still run to several dozen named forms across North, Central, and South America. For hunters, the names that matter most include Coues’ deer in the American Southwest and Mexico, the Florida Key deer in the Florida Keys, the large northern whitetails of Canada and the northern United States, and the smaller tropical forms of Mexico and Central America.
Some of these forms are endangered, such as the Florida Key deer, the smallest North American whitetail. Others are especially coveted by hunters. Coues’ deer, a small desert whitetail of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico, has a cult following of its own. Then there’s the Sitka blacktail, a coastal rainforest deer found in British Columbia and Alaska, including several islands such as Kodiak. With British Columbia’s grizzly hunt closed, Southeast Alaska remains one of the classic bear-and-blacktail destinations, and many hunters don’t mind adding a small but uncommon deer to their quarry list.
Some say there are too many names, and that a number of traditional subspecies should be dropped from the list. They may be right. So, our next possible answer to “How many kinds of deer are there in North America?” is not an ironclad scientific number, but rather a traditional hunting-and-natural-history count. Take 31 subspecies of the white-tailed, black-tailed, and mule deer, add 4 subspecies of brocket deer, 3 of moose, 5 of elk, and 5 of caribou, and you get 58 subspecies of the deer family in North America.
Deer and Deer Trophies: The Great Multiplier
In this story, we’re talking only about deer species that are native to North America. Should we include also the exotics like axis or fallow deer, the number would be even greater. But the greatest multiplier of “kinds” of deer are the trophy books. For example, modern classification goes with three subspecies of the North American moose. Trophy books list four.
It happens, because from a hunter’s viewpoint, biology doesn’t answer all the questions. One population of an animal may belong to the same species than another, and yet have smaller antlers because the area it inhabits lacks nutrients essential for antler growth. An exceptional trophy from that area will not equal an average one from a richer location. On the other hand, one area may be less accessible than another, and it may take more work to get a good trophy from there. Trophy books try to level the hunters’ chances of entry, and that interest does not always coincide with biological taxonomy.
The SCI trophy books divide North American deer trophies across geographic locations, and further divide some of them into typical and non-typical, free-range and estate categories. In older North American deer accounting, you can find separate categories for black-tailed deer such as Columbia and Sitka, for mule deer such as Rocky Mountain, desert, and Tiburón Island, and for whitetails such as Coues, Texas, Northwestern, Midwestern, Northeastern, Southeastern, Carmen Mountain, Anticosti, and several Mexican forms.
The total number of trophy categories are: 6 for black-tailed deer, 12 for mule deer, and as many as 36 for white-tailed deer. Add 7 categories for caribou, 11 for elk, 4 for moose, and 4 for North American brocket deer, and you can arrive at roughly 80 North American deer trophy categories. This is, of course, not a biological species count, but, from the point of view of a trophy hunter, there may indeed be about 80 “kinds” of North American deer to dream about.
All of the Above
As you can see, there are 3 kinds of “deer” in general, 6 members of the deer family, 58 officially recognized subspecies of deer, and 80 trophy categories of deer in North America. So, whatever number you selected, you were correct! That’s what we try to achieve here. BookYourHunt.com is focused on creating a win-win situation for both hunters and outfitters. That’s why no matter what you think about the number of North American deer, you win.
Does that answer satisfy you? Tell us what you think in the comments!
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Thank you for this very informative article. The number of subspecies was amazing.
I live in Texas where white tail are plentiful. One time, my mother and I came across a herd of Mule deer. She got so excited at seeing them because they had been gone from our area for awhile.
And few years ago, I saw a black tailed doe. She was beautiful.
I assume she escaped from a game preserve. I never saw a blacktail buck.
But last year, she had a black tail fawn.
Again, thank you for this article.
It is surprising to me that the deer in the Sonora desert -the size of sm-med dogs- are not considered a “kind.” I would have expected such since they look & act very differently from Whitetails, not just in size, but also antlers.