Frequent E-mail Question," Do Whitetail Deer ever Sleep " ?

                         

Do Whitetail Deer ever Sleep ?

 A real experienced Whitetail Deer hunter knows the tell tale signs of the Whitetail Deer's bedding areas.
The more you put in to understanding a Whitetails daily movement patterns most of the time consist of the deer's nightly feeding locations and the resting location to which they usually return to during the day time.
 Now the question is what do the deer do in the bedding areas ? Do they sleep or just chew on their cud ? To tell you the truth this topic is rarely discussed in our blogspots and because of the amount of e-mails on the radio broadcast I am writing this article.
 Well, the real simple answer is yes ! In fact all Birds and Mammals sleep. Domestic animals such as Cows Sheep and Horses may even sleep standing up. Some animals mechanisms of sleep are fairly well documented, no one knows the exact reasons why animals sleep is less clear. After researching about twenty years of articles on the subject research have only produced clues to the true function of sleep.
 First, lets examine what sleep is and then lok at how this applies to the Whitetail Deer. Definition, sleep is a physiological state of rest that is necessary for the species survival. But sleep differs from unconsciousness in that sleep includes the capability of arousal, and many different animals obviously must sleep a lot differently. If you were a predator for example, you could afford to take longer, much deeper lengths of sleep to survive.
 If you were a Deer, a prey species you probably could not. For the whitetail deer, sleep is definitely necessary for their health and survival. And on the other spectrum, so is the ability to be somewhat alert to predators while sleeping.Sleep according to science is a time to rebuild cells and to recover from the physiological and you're physical activities that had occurred while you were awake.
 Sleep can divided into two general types: REM ( rapid eye movement) and also NREM ( non rapid eye movement) In basic laymens terms, NREM accounts for about 75% to 80 % of a persons sleep time, and REM is the remainder where most of dreaming occurs.
  Now we know that all Deer indeed do sleep and have a idea of why that they sleep. Wayne
    ( Source were Newspaper articles and Kim Adams in some of her work for QDMA) and personal observations in my life in the "Outdoor Scene"