Black-tailed deer
| Black-tailed deer | |
|---|---|
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| Male black-tailed deer (Olympic National Park) | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Artiodactyla |
| Family: | Cervidae |
| Subfamily: | Capreolinae |
| Genus: | Odocoileus |
| Species: | O. hemionus |
| Subspecies: | O. h. columbianus |
| Trinomial name | |
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Odocoileus hemionus columbianus (Richardson, 1829) |
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Two forms of black-tailed deer or blacktail deer that occupy coastal woodlands in the Pacific Northwest are subspecies of the mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus). They have sometimes been treated as a species, but virtually all recent authorities maintain they are subspecies. The Columbian black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) is found in western North America, from Northern California into the Pacific Northwest and coastal British Columbia. The Sitka deer (Odocoileus hemionus sitkensis) is found coastally in British Columbia, Southeast Alaska and Southcentral Alaska (as far as Kodiak Island).
Black-tailed deer once lived at least as far east as Wyoming. In Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail, an eyewitness account of his 1846 trek across the early West, while within a two-day ride from Fort Laramie, Parkman writes of shooting what he believes to be an elk, only to discover he has killed a black-tailed deer.
The black-tailed deer is currently common in California, western Oregon, Washington, in coastal and interior British Columbia, and north into the Alaskan panhandle. It is a popular game animal.
Though it has been argued that the black-tailed deer is a species, virtually all recent authorities maintain it as a subspecies of the mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus). Strictly speaking, the black-tailed deer group consists of two subspecies, as it also includes O. h. sitkensis (Sitka black-tailed deer). The black-tailed deer group and the mule deer group (sensu stricto) hybridize and appear to have evolved from the black-tailed deer group. Despite this, the mtDNA of the white-tailed deer and mule deer are similar, but differ from that of the black-tailed deer. This may be the result of introgression, although hybrids between the mule deer and white-tailed deer are rare in the wild (apparently more common locally in West Texas), and the hybrid survival rate is low even in captivity.
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Wikipedia