As someone whose career has been built around wildlife, sometimes a report or study comes along that makes me shrug my shoulders and that feeling of “this is no joke” washes over me. Steve Rinella recently shared such a fact-finder in his MeatEater newsletter.
In this case, the question was which predator was most likely to stimulate a behavioral response in white-tailed deer. In other words, what scared them into changing their habits. Conversational human voices were by far the most frightening sounds the deer were exposed to.
Commentary: The Most Feared Predator Among Cervids? One Study Shows It’s Humans
