The America's Unknown Deer

In the southern portion of North America there exists a strange habitat that is virtually unknown to most of us. Inland from the bright lights of Cancun, Mexico, lie thousands of square miles of tropical jungle, thick and steamy with monkeys chattering overhead and a tangle of vines and underbrush growing from decaying Mayan ruins. Through these jungles stalk small, reddish-colored pumas, ocelots and the mighty jaguar. The game they stalk includes, of course, the ever-present whitetail deer, though a scaled-down tropical version of our familiar Virginia whitetail. Javelina are on the menu as well, plus their southern cousin, the white-lipped peccary. But the primary prey these jungle cats stalk is neither the whitetail nor the peccary, but the small brocket deer of the southern jungle.

What, you've never heard of a brocket deer? No surprise. Few people have. Brockets are a small, straight-antlered deer that range from the jungles of Yucatan, in southern Mexico, to northern Argentina or thereabouts. The taxonomists have assigned them their own genus, Mazama, and there are several varieties. Some of them may properly be considered South American animals. Two of them, the red brocket and brown brocket, are just as North American as any of our other big-game animals.

How so? Well, it's pretty simple. Some folks figure North America stops at Mexico's southern border. Others figure a better demarcation is the Isthmus of Panama or, better still, the Panama Canal itself. Any way you slice it, southern Mexico is part of North America--and that's where you find both red and brown brockets.

Several years back I spent a week hunting the Yucatan jungle for these little deer. I was not successful, which can happen. The others in camp were successful, which can also happen. I would have liked to have taken one, but instead I came away with an appreciation for a whole different world that exists right here in North America. I seriously doubt that I'll start a run on brocket deer hunting, but I hope I can share a sense of what that fascinating world is like.

Let's start with the deer. The brown brocket and red brocket generally coexist in the jungles of Campeche, Quintana Roo and several other of Mexico's southern states. They are different enough that the biologists describe them as two separate species. The brown (also called gray) brocket is Mazama gouazoubira, while the red brocket is M. americana. In our piece of forest I couldn't tell the difference in habitat, but properly the brown brocket is more a creature of the forest edge, while the red brocket stays in the thick stuff. The brown is supposed to be a bit larger, but they're pretty similar in weight.

While I was in camp we took one brown and one red, both very nice bucks. Although their weights were about the same (35 pounds), their appearance was quite different. The brown brocket is built very similarly to the whitetail deer, and a mounted specimen could be mistaken for a diminutive spike whitetail. The red is blockier and shorter in build and is extremely orange-red in color.

Both varieties grow simple (and wicked) spikes for antlers. So few have been taken by people who cared to save and measure the antlers that it's impossible to say how big either species really gets, but antlers of four inches should probably be considered exceptional for either variety.