Buck deer stock

A majestic white-tailed buck.

(Thinkstock photo)

Anyone with a garden in Central New York can tell you that deer will eat everything, but it seems that the graceful and innocent white-tailed animals have pulled a fast one on us.

In several instances around the world, the doe-eyed "herbivores" have been spotted chowing down on baby birds.

io9 cites several reports, some quite a few years old, of deer being caught on camera preying on nesting song birds.

Using "nest cams," researchers in North Dakota set out to observe bird nests, expecting to find eggs being stolen by squirrels, foxes and other predators. Squirrels were spotted egg-napping at 13 different nests, but foxes and weasels each only bothered with one nest apiece.

White-tailed deer put the last two predator species to shame, showing up several times and actually eating living baby birds right out of the nests.

In another instance, researchers in Canada, using "mist nets" to gently trap birds, spotted deer walking straight up to the imprisoned birds and eating them alive right out of the trap.

Apparently, the phenomenon isn't limited to white-tailed deer either. Other herbivorous species have been spotted munching on recently-hatched chicks.

In India, a farmer caught his cow on video eating a baby chicken, and a biologist in Scotland watched red deer devour seabird chicks, according to National Geographic. That researcher concluded that the deer was eating birds to get nutrients to help grow its antlers. Others think it could be a more generic nutritional deficit that pushes herbivores to eat meat, and some experts think it's just something vegetarian animals occasionally do, for no specific reason.

Huffington Post pointed out that this isn't exactly new information. In fact it's been known about for some time. Last year, HuffPo picked up a story about a family that was horrified to find a deer eating a baby bird in their back yard.

The video was originally posted in 2010, and picked up by Reddit a few years later.

WARNING: The videos below may be disturbing to some viewers:

So we have to ask, Bambi, what went wrong?