Dear Little Key Deer

Key deer (Odocoileus virginianus clavium) are on the endangered list and are a subspecies of white-tailed deer. They live only in the Florida Keys. My sister and her husband kindly took us off the main highway on Big Pine Key to search for these smaller-than-usual deer. The males are about thirty inches tall at the shoulder.

Deer rear was all I got!

But my sister caught a shot of this one that was in someone’s back yard. This one looked really small.

A ship-wrecked Spanish sailor wrote about encountering them in the 1550’s. Since hunting them was banned in the 1930’s, the main killer of Key deer has been cars. Key deer swim between the islands and manage to survive in a variety of habitats.