Ever wonder how far a deer can swim? Some people find them swimming out in large lakes or the ocean miles from land.
Matt Ross from the National Deer Association decided to check out how far they can swim with verifiable data. Since deer are studied in detail with tracking collars for research these days there is data on their travels.
So, he found the following information on how far they had actually swum.
Case 1
A Minnesota study found a fawn that crossed a moderate sized lake. Depending on whether the fawn used an island or not, it swam five hundred to eleven hundred yards.
Case 2
A study on the Long Island Sound in New York found two deer that swam from Shelter Island to the North Fork of Long Island. The shortest distance was roughly one thousand yards.
Case 3
A deer in a study in the Fort Drum area of New York swam around one thousand yards across the St Lawrence River, and was harvested in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
Case 4
Twenty collared deer in California routinely swam across a reservoir, a distance of five hundred to seven hundred yards.
Case 5
A collared deer in Pennsylvania crossed the Allegheny River at a point approximately three hundred fifty yards wide and another deer crossed the Susquehanna River at a point almost fourteen hundred yards wide.
Case 6
Brian Peterson in Nebraska found a set of shed antlers from the same buck three years in a row and the locations proved that the deer had crossed the Platte River, a distance of about five hundred yards.
Case 7
Researchers in Mississippi collared a now famous deer, Buck Number one hundred forty, in the Mississippi Delta. He swam the river at flood stage, a distance of one and one quarter mile or two thousand twenty yards. He crossed the river a total of 4 times over the next two years.
Case 8
This study involved deer along the Mississippi River in Arkansas during flood stage. The deer’s home range went under almost forty feet of water for over a month. Four of these deer swam the following distances across the river from Arkansas to Mississippi:
- Nine-tenths of a mile or sixteen hundred yards.
- Eight-tenths of a mile or fourteen hundred yards and then swam back across one and nine-tenths mile or thirty-three hundred yards three weeks later.
- One and four-tenths mile and swam one mile back seven months later.
- Two and four-tenths miles or forty-three hundred yards.
This last buck has the longest documented swimming distance provided for this article by researchers.
Deer are good athletes with a large set of lungs and very good stamina, so distances greater than these shared seem quite possible.
The information in this blog came from this article.
