The white-tailed deer is the national animal of Costa Rica, which is scientifically known as Odocoileus virginianus. Costa Rica’s national animal White-tailed deer is native to the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America as far south as Peru and Bolivia. It has also been introduced to New Zealand, Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Bahamas, Lesser Antilles, and some countries in Europe.
Costa Rica’s national animal is White-tailed deer eating a wide variety of plant food. Tender shoots, leaves, and twigs of shrubs and trees are looking through them. Many of the common agricultural and garden crops are also eaten by them. White-tailed deer became the national animal of Costa Rica.
White-Tailed Deer Description
Costa Rica’s national animal Whitetail deer color is reddish-brown in the summer, which is turned to grayish-brown in winter. The eyes, muzzle, and throat are surrounded by white fur, as well as the under portion of the belly and tail. When a whitetail deer is worried, it will raise its tail to expose the white underside. It is a signal of warning for other deer, and this instinct gives the whitetail deer its name. Whitetail deer have an enormously diverse diet and can eat more than 600 species of plants.
They prefer acorns, grasses, leaves, crops like soybeans and corn, berries, twigs, fungi, fruit, and nuts to eat. They have a four-chambered stomach, which can digest extremely tough vegetation. Whitetails have jagged incisors and big molars for biting grinding it up when they chew. Costa Rica’s national animal White-tailed Deer has belonged separate name for both males and females. The male deer are called bucks and females are does or Doze. The color of white-tailed deer is grayish-brown in winter, which turns to tan or reddish-brown in summer.
National animal of Costa Rica Facts
- Common name: white-tailed deer; Virginia deer; Virginia white-tailed deer; Columbian white-tailed deer; Common deer; sand-hill deer; whitetail deer; Key deer; Coues deer; Texas white-tailed deer; jumping deer; flag-tailed deer; banner-tail; long-tailed deer;
- Scientific name: Odocoileus virginianus.
- Habitat: White-tailed Deer habitat includes roadways, fields, pastures, and woodland clearings. Open areas are used only when thick shrubs or forests are nearby. Also the areas along streams and rivers, mixed woodlands, farms, forests, and burned shrub fields.
- Diet: acorns, grasses, leaves, crops like soybeans and corn, berries, twigs, fungi, fruit, nuts, legumes, bark, and clover.
- Weight: 68 to 141 kg (male) and 41 to 96 kg (female)
- Average height: 68 to 114 cm
- Average lifespan: In internment 6 to 14 years
- Breeding season: Breeding occurs from October to December, fawns are born in the spring.
Although some parts of the body are white like as belly, throat, under the tail, insides of the legs, inside the ears, around the nose, and eyes. The male white-tailed deer have antlers. The White-tailed deer, Costa Rica’s National animal is one of the most distinctive mammals in the Americas, which symbolized tenderness tempered with strength, peace, energy, fertility, and prosperity. It outstandingly represents and glorifies the spirit of Costa Rica.
Reference:
- https://americanexpedition.us/
- http://naturemappingfoundation.org/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/
- www.nhptv.org/natureworks/whitetaileddeer.htm