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Coues Deer
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If someone should conduct a beauty contest among the game animals of the Southwest, I have no doubt the Arizona whitetail would win hands down. A big buck mule deer, with its massive antlers and blocky build is a magnificent sight. Likewise a great desert ram or lordly bull elk. But the Arizona whitetail is an exquisitely lovely thing.
The Coues white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus couesi) is a native North American deer that occurs nowhere else in the world. Its native habitate is the altiplano of Arizona, New Mexico and Northern Mexico. The deer has a gray coat in the winter that lets it blend into the landscape and become almost invisible and for this reason it is often called the "gray ghost". The Coues is a member of the whitetail family.
Physically, it is the smallest of the native American deer, seldom weighing more than 90 pounds. As in all deer, the females tend to run smaller, about 60 to seventy pounds. It is also a beautiful animal. Coues are perfectly proportioned and exquisitely graceful in movement. Its markings, particularly the white rings around the eyes make it a beautiful trophy.
Except for its coloring and size, the Coues deer is very much like the white tail. The are small differences in the chest patch and the tail (which is somewhat lager and also changes color with the seasons. It can also have slightly lager antlers (in relation to its size) than the Whitetail. Overall, it has inherited and enhanced the beauty and grace of the Whitetail family that make it so unlike the heavier set, more compact Mule Deer.
When startled or in danger from a predator Coues run with the same exquisite grace of a whitetail bounding through the landscape with a beautiful, ballet like leaping motion that will sometimes leave the hunter in awe and unable to shoot.
Like the whitetail, Coues are ruminants but not grazers and subsist on the leaves, shrubs and buds of trees and bushes. Their favorite foods are evergreens followed by the native shrubs.
We should also note that anthropologically, the Coues is the youngest of the North American deer, the Whitetail is the oldest and the Mule deer fall between the two. There are several universities doing DNA reseach to determine the exact differences between the three native American species. It will be interesting to discover the degree of isolation (if any) that exists between the Whitetail and the Coues species
