THE WORLD’S MOST PROLIFIC WHITETAILS

Understandably, it’s not often that anyone gets the opportunity to follow a free-ranging doe’s behavior and reproductive performance, with any degree of precision, for more than a few years. Nonetheless, there are three interesting exceptions, well-documented in the Journal of Mammalogy, that tracked the reproductive history of a few truly prolific whitetail does.

DIANA OF TOMHEGAN CAMPS

Ralph S. Palmer presented an especially enlightening chronicle of a semi-tame doe named Diana, that was supplementally fed, but wandered freely about the unhunted grounds of Tomhegan Camps, Maine. According to the published account (plus some additional notes supplied by Palmer), Diana was born in 1934 and died in 1952 when she was 18½ years old, presumably due to wounds inflicted by a buck’s