White-tail does are painstakingly careful to keep their offspring hidden from predators. When foraging, females leave their offspring in dense vegetation for about four hours at a time. While waiting for the female to return, fawns lay flat on the ground with their necks outstretched, well camouflaged against the forest floor. Fawns withhold their feces and urine until the mother arrives, at which point she ingests whatever the fawn voids to deny predators any sign of the fawn. Conservation Life span in the wild is 10 years, but White-tail deer have lived up to 20 years in captivity .
Adult deer have few predators except for humans, Mountain Lions and wolves, where they still exist.
State fish and game agencies regard deer as a renewable, harvestable resource for viewing and hunting. Sport hunters bag about 1 million Mule Deer and 2 million White-tailed Deer annually. The National Park Service estimates that between 23 and 40 million White-tailed Deer inhabited North America before the arrival of Europeans. For a number of years the population was greatly reduced in the U.S., due to habitat loss and unrestricted hunting. But by the mid-20th century, the population has been restored throughout North America.