Hey People, Leave The Fawns Alone!
Hey People, Leave The Fawns Alone!
A lot of times, when we try to help wildlife, we just end up making things worse.
Holy crow, you’re back! You must really like learning about deer! Lucky for you, I’ve got at least two more deer stories coming your way, and then perhaps we’ll switch things up a bit.
Variety is the spice of life, after all, and fortunately for all of us, North America is home to more than 400+ species of mammals, 900+ birds, 600+ reptiles, 300+ amphibians, at least 4,000 arachnids, and innummerable other living creatures of unbelievable and under-appreciated majesty. So yeah, we could be here for a while!
If you missed the Deer Series: Part 1, we learned about some of the white-tailed deer’s super senses, including its panoramic vision and muscley ears. Part 2 was dedicated to the deer’s sniffer, as well as the invisible ink that is deer urine. And Part 3 delved into deer hanky panky, the myth behind big bucks, and generally, what Bambi got wrong.
In Part 4 (which is this email), we’re going to get personal and prescriptive. Because what good is knowing all of this stuff about deer if you don’t know how to co-exist with the ones in your backyard or city park?
Also, real quick: If you’d like to read my writing elsewhere, this week I’ve got a new column up at The Washington Post’s KidsPost Section (aimed at readers aged 7- to 11-years-old, but perfectly informative for adults, too!). It’s about why our feet and armpits stink.
A Deer Named ‘Squirrel’
When I was 17, I became father to a fawn.
My girlfriend at the time came from a family that raised white-tailed deer. Not commercially, but as a sort of hobby. Her dad and uncle kept a small herd of a dozen animals or so. From her back porch, you could see the animals just walking around, doing their thing—only a 10-foot-tall fence between us.
One morning, her dad discovered a newborn fawn nestled against the fence—the outside of the fence. Apparently, a pregnant doe had been attracted to the spot the night before and decided to give birth there. Then it disappeared, perhaps scared away by a dog or even my girlfriend’s dad as he made his morning rounds.
Upon finding the pitiable creature, her dad figured the best thing to do was to put the animal out of its misery. My girlfriend immediately rejected that idea and adopted the fawn. Of course, I was along for the ride.
I remember the little guy being small enough to cradle like a baby, but with long, sharp legs that kept getting free of the blanket we wrapped around him. That scene in Bambi where he takes his first steps? We saw that happen in real life. It was like watching a stuffed animal learning how to use stilts.
With a bottle of warm milk and a rubber nipple, we did our best to coax the fawn to eat, but he seemed more interested in slashing my forearms with his hooves. It was taxing work, especially those first few days and nights. Baby deer come into the world ready to run away from predators, but they don’t know much else. Like how to eat a square meal. Or even how to poop.
In the wild, a mother deer spends a lot of time licking the fawn’s bottom to stimulate defecation. We made do with a warm, wet washcloth.
Somehow, it all worked. And even though the fawn seemed to kick us more than he ate, he survived those first few weeks. We named him Squirrel.
By the time I went off for my freshman year of college in the fall, Squirrel had quadrupled in size and was large enough to live with the other deer in the enclosure. Our relationship with the rest of the deer was unchanged—they still bolted away anytime we came near—but it was different with Squirrel. Sometimes, he’d peel off from the herd and edge close enough to nibble leaves out of our hands. It was almost as if he wasn’t shy of us, the humans, but worried about what the other deer would think.
I’ll admit, this all sounds pretty adorable. But I know now what we did was wrong.
And I’m not just saying that because two months later Squirrel tried to jump the fence of his enclosure and got his head stuck in the upper rungs. My girlfriend’s dad found him hanging there, lifeless, not far from the spot where he’d been born the previous spring.
The thing is, if we’d have simply left Squirrel alone, his mother would have probably come back for him. Because that’s what mother deer do.
Just after birth, does stash their fawns in hiding places so that they can go back into the landscape and fill up on food, which their four-chambered stomachs convert into energy for themselves and milk for the babes. To us, it looks like abandonment. But it’s actually a highly evolved behavior that has enabled deer to survive since before the lands that are now Chicago and New York City lay beneath glaciers.
Unfortunately, people mess with fawns ALL THE TIME.
Yes, I was one of them. The problem is so widespread, that each spring and summer state wildlife agencies devote a good amount of time trying to convince the well-intentioned public to just let the fawns be.
The good news is that if you’ve already touched the deer or moved it, this doesn’t mean it’s too late to do the right thing. There’s a pervasive myth that mother animals will not return to their young after they “smell like a human” but there’s really no evidence to support this. Biologists handle young animals all the time as part of their research, and they can confirm that, in general, the mother will not exile her young over a little human stink.
It’s probably also worth mentioning that many jurisdictions have made it illegal to harass, feed, or possess wildlife. So you may not just be messing with nature. You could also be breaking the law.
The Doggo & The Damage Done
Of course, there’s another common way people come into contact with deer—and that’s through their pooches.
When walking in a park, on a trail, or near any wild area, it’s always a good idea to keep your dog on a leash. This is because even a small dog can give chase to a deer. And while it might seem like great fun for your terrier to act like a wolf, at the end of the day, Sparky gets a full bowl of kibble to replenish his energy stores. But a deer has to work for its fuel, and the energy wasted on evading your dog can put a wild animal’s carefully balanced ledger in the red.
It’s not just about the deer, though. Keeping your dog leashed may save its life.
This is because a deer will sometimes decide to fight rather than flee. This tends to happen more often during the fall breeding season when hormones are running high, but also during the birthing season in spring and summer. Does show strong fidelity to their birthing sites, which means they’ll come back to the same place year after year. Even if it happens to overlap with your backyard.
But what if it looks like your dog is “frolicking” with the deer, or vice versa? If a deer paws at the ground, snorts, runs toward your dog and then away, or even simply stands still as your dog approaches, the deer is actually issuing warning signals, not invitations.
Remember, dogs are predators, even if they don’t always look the part. And prey do not play with predators.
In any case, it only takes a few, lightning-quick hoof blows or antler strikes to put your pooch in animal hospital. Or worse. Is it really worth the risk?
Next Week: The Best Intentions
As we wrap up this deer extravaganza, we’re going to talk about one of the biggest questions people have about deer—is it okay to feed them? I hope you’ll come on back for Part 5. Because the answer is probably going to piss some people off. And you might just be one of them!