A deer eating a wolf in northern Minnesota
From a recent news article: “The public in northern Minnesota is in uproar demanding the government shoot the deer to save the wolves. Local resident Billy Joe Bob said: “The deer have decimated the vegetation so now they are starting to eat the wolves! Something must be done!”
It’s a strange world we live in, and hopefully its clear there is no such news article but it is a nice segue into this rather strange observation of a young deer that spent lots of time munching on the bones of a dead wolf this past fall.
A bit of backstory: the carcass in the video is from a wolf that was killed for depredation purposes in the area. We got possession of the carcass to take measurements and biological samples. After doing so, we put the wolf’s body back in the woods so it could return to the forest, so to speak.
We put up cameras to see what animals visited or scavenged the carcass (will have a video showing this soon!). And in the fall, this young button buck showed up.
And not only did he visit but he continued to visit. Over a one month period of time, this deer visited the wolf carcass 14 times and spent a total of 3.3 hr munching on wolf bones. An interesting and strange reversal of this predator-prey relationship…the wolf being eaten by the deer.
We are sure many folks are going to want to know why the deer did this. We don’t know what the deer was thinking necessarily but we suspect it was trying to get minerals from the bones but hard to know for sure
Learn more about the Voyageurs Wolf Project:
Website: http://www.voyageurswolfproject.org
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