Mule deer are the large deer species that live in the Western part of North America. Its species is called the Odocoileus hemionus while the black-tailed deer is a subspecies of it. Most mule deer live in high altitudes.
Figure 2: Female and Male Mule Deer. Their fur colour is greyish-brown and more significantly, their face, as well as the rump, is white in colour.
Their tails are also white in colour with a black tip. These large ears help the deer to detect far-off dangers and to dissipate heat. Whitetail deer refers to a North American deer with a rather long tail white on the under surface and the males of which have forward-arching antlers while mule deer refers to a long-eared deer of western North America that is larger and more heavily built than the white-tailed deer. Hence, this is the main difference between whitetail and mule deer.
Whitetail deer is Odocoileus virginianus while mule deer is Odocoileus hemionus. Furthermore, a visibly identifiable difference between whitetail and mule deer is that the whitetail deer have a brown coloured face with white circles around their eyes and nose while the face of the mule deer is mostly white in colour.
One can easily be mistaken for the other. Even some of the sounds these deer make can be similar. So, be sure you know the differences — some subtle and some more pronounced — so you can easily tell the difference between the two. View Cart Checkout. Posted in Blog , Deer Hunting , Hunting Depending on the time of year, mule deer and white tail deer can be almost indistinguishable.
Mule deer and whitetail similarities Although there are some distinct differences, whitetail and mule deer do have some things in common. Coloring During the Summertime, mule deer are often more tannish-brown while whitetail tend to be more of a reddish brown color.
However, in Winter, both types tend to turn more grayish. Select options. Sale Product on sale. THESE are the minerals your deer herd needs to thrive.
Click to learn more. Learn the DIY euro mount process step-by-step! Want to hunt deer, but wonder where to shoot? Click here! Trending Smallmouth vs. The characteristics between mule deer vs. So in this post, we'll go into detail about these two species, and provide some side-by-side examples of the differences between them.
Good luck, and happy hunting! Differences between these two animals can be a little bit difficult to see, but the more you study the variations between these two animals, the clearer they become.
We've broken the differences down in a few main categories, including:. This seems like a good place to start, because the mule deer gets its name from the size of its ears: they're big and broad like a mule's ears, hence the name.
In most cases, mule deer will have longer, pointier ears than white-tail deer. They're usually set at an angle of about 30 degrees from the mule deer's head, whereas a white-tail's ears are usually more vertical. Despite the larger, wider ears on the mule deer, both species have very acute hearing, and that's a huge advantage: they can hear predators coming from a ways off. If you're looking at these two images and thinking, "They're not really that different," well—there's some truth to that!
The ears aren't really a tell-all sign, and they're certainly difficult to see on a deer in the wild. They can look similar, and as we mentioned earlier, you'll need to take a lot of features into account before you'll be able to differentiate mules from white-tails.
Keeping on the topic of names, the white-tail gets its name because Its tail is white. What makes things confusing—and what makes the names a little misleading—is that the mule deer also has a white tail.
A white-tail uses its white tail as a signal: when they're in danger, their white tails will dart up as a signal to other deer that there's trouble someplace near. Mule deer don't do that—they have the white tail, but it's not used to communicate in the same way.
There's another difference, too, though: mule deer tails are a little thinner—they kind of look like a rope—and they have black coloring around the edge of the tail, as you can see here:. As we mentioned, that's so other deer can see it and be on high alert, but it's also to send a message to any predators in the area—basically saying, "I'm aware of you and that you want to eat me, and I'm going to run and make you spend a lot of energy chasing me, so it's better to just let me go.
One more tail-related item before we move on: there's a kind of deer called the black-tailed deer , and that's actually a sub-species of the mule deer, and it shares a LOT of traits of the mule deer. We talk about black-tailed deer in this post here. Most mule deer have antlers that "fork"—that is, they divide in two, and then each of those forks divide in two.
It doesn't always work like that—there's a lot of variation in nature, thank goodness—but that pattern is what you'll usually see on a mule deer. Awesome info. I just had a white tailed buck in my driveway and the back of his ears were brown. The mule deer are brown underneath. Good tip on the white underneath. I thought I knew everything about muleys and whitetails. However, I learned much more from your comparisims and fawn info than I ever thought.
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Posted on March 18, by Wayne D. Learn how ear size, tail shape, antlers, and other features and behaviors can help you distinguish between mule deer and white-tailed deer. Antlers Mule Deer vs White-tailed Deer — Buck Antler View Bucks of both species shed their antlers yearly — in January or February for whitetails, while mule deer have to hold up their racks a month longer, typically shedding them in February or March.
Color and Movement Mule Deer vs White-tailed Deer — Doe Broadside View Mule deer tend to have more grayish-brown fur, where whitetail fur is usually more reddish-brown. Doe Size Mule Deer vs White-tailed Deer — Doe Front View Mule deer does weigh in between and pounds, whereas white-tailed does come in anywhere from lbs. Thanks, Larry. Well written and good photos, not 5 pages of history and scientific details like some articles.
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