White-tailed deer appear in 918 South Dakota records touching 54 counties, one of the most widespread maps in the state’s mammal atlas. Custer County leads with 352, followed by Pennington and Lawrence in the Black Hills, but the record runs east through Minnehaha, Brookings, and a long tail of farm counties to the state’s eastern edge.
An edge animal in every corner of the state
Whitetails live on edges, where woody cover meets open feeding ground, and South Dakota supplies that in two distinct forms. East of the Missouri River they work river bottoms, shelterbelts, and the brushy seams between crop fields, while in the west they hold to the pine valleys and meadow margins of the Black Hills, from Custer State Park and Black Hills National Forest to Wind Cave National Park. The Lewis and Clark Recreation Area and Missouri National Recreational River anchor the record along the big river itself.
Fawns, then the rut
Reports climb through May and June, when does drop spotted fawns and leave them bedded in grass while they feed, and stay high through summer. November brings a second rise with the rut, when bucks abandon their usual caution to trail does across roads and open country. In the west, the raised white flag of a running whitetail is the surest way to separate it from a mule deer, which carries a narrow rope of a tail and bounds away on all four feet at once.
Status in South Dakota
NatureServe ranks the white-tailed deer S5, Secure, in South Dakota, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
