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Roe deer    Metskits or  kaber     Capreolus capreolus

 

 

 

For a month or a month and a half adult roe bucks are quite without antlers. Some young bucks may wear pencil-thick stick antlers during that period; these are shed in February so that the proper antlers can begin to develop (this winter no such individual has come into camera view).

 

What do roe deer use for food in winter in addition to sprouting grain in fields and shoots of shrubs and trees? Their sleeping quarters, in a sheltered coppice, must be cleared of snow in one way or another (a deer sleeping on snow can easily catch pneumonia or bowel inflammations, and deer will as a rule not recover from such illnesses). From under the snow blueberry stems as well as lingonberry and heather shrubs turn up – all suitable for filling the belly.

 

How then do the roe deer, extremely picky about food in summer, manage on this diet in winter? The explanation is that in autumn their stomach adapts to a period of poorer food. The villi, small fingerlike projections on the internal walls of the intestine, grow longer in order to help the organism to absorb nutrients better from food with less food value. Thus the roe deer can manage on about a third of the amount of food as in the summer.