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Post by chrysanthemum on Jun 18, 2021 20:53:21 GMT -6
A couple days ago I was clearing the mulch off the small potato bed, harvesting the last of the potatoes, amending the soil with some homemade fertilizer, watering it in, and planting a couple of watermelon seeds. When I’d finished that work and was putting some tools away, I caught sight of this little creature just a few feet away from me. I’d gone past the little one who knows how many times with my tools and turning water on and off at our rain tank, and I never saw it at all till I was finishing up. It must have felt safe there because it stayed in almost the same spot for about eight hours, and it was back again today. My five year old and I were looking at the material in the new raised beds when he said to me, “I see the fawn.” I thought he was pretending (he’s a master at pretending), but he pointed, and there the little guy was quietly nestled alongside a bed about fifteen feet from us. His coat blends in so well with the wood chips.
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Post by macmex on Jun 19, 2021 4:54:50 GMT -6
Aww! I could be wrong, but I believe they stay where "Momma puts them," holding tight, no matter what. I see the same behavior with Muscovy ducklings. Every morning "Momma Duck" decides to go to the pond and get a bath. She calls her babies ( I mean really young ones) over and somehow tells them to "Stay put while I'm away." The babies huddle together, making the smallest profile possible and... there they stay. I can walk up on them an they won't break formation unless I physically reach down and start handling them. Yet when "Momma" comes back, they break formation and pick up following her as before.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 19, 2021 12:22:32 GMT -6
My wife raised a little female fawn from a baby last summer. It only weighed 4 pounds when it was brought to her after running into a pond and nearly freezing during last Spring's very cold month of May. It was so weak, it had no suck reflex left in it, so she had to feed it with a syringe filled with baby deer formula. It had to be fed every few hours, day and night for several days, and was 'touch and go' for a while before it ever took a bottle on its own.
Now, the deer is a year old and comes back to our house to see my wife every day. When she was a baby, we kept her in a 45' foot hoop house covered with chicken wire and reinforced with cattle panels so no predators could get in. The enclosure was built for raising Bob White Quail and critically endangered geese, so it was already in place.
We always felt sad for her having to stay in the enclosure when she was small, so no dogs or coyotes would eat her, but apparently, she liked it. We turned her loose about 6 months ago (after deer season had ended). Every day, she returns to the enclosure and mills around in there, waiting for my wife to get back home to go love on her. As soon as she's loved on for a while; she just leaves ... Who knows where she goes? She's kind of like a cat, just loving you on her own terms. However, almost without fail, I'll see her in the enclosure each morning while out doing chores. She'll come out to follow me around for a while, then go back to the enclosure and hang out with the chickens. I suppose that's her version of family. She gets along wonderfully with our chickens. She adores our cats. She'll lick the cats until they can't stand it anymore, but they always come back so she can do it again later on.
When baby deer are small, they have a reflex spot on the small of their back. If you touch them there they will just collapse in place and stay down until you touch them somewhere else, (like on the face). I think that's how their mama hides them. I've seen does running into a thicket with their fawns many times, then, will see the doe immerge on the other side without the baby. The mama hardly breaks stride while doing this. It had always been a mystery to me how it was done until we started taking care of this little one.
It's hard to imagine life without that little deer sneaking up from behind and startling me while doing my chores. It seems she's always around somewhere and almost invisible when she stands still in the woods. My wife crocheted a bright pink collar for her out of survey tape, so hopefully people who see her will know she's not their dinner. If the collar gets hung up in brush, it just tears off. We've had to replace it several times.She's sort of a nuisance at times, but she's pretty sweet. In this series of photos, she's trying to get my wife to let her drink iced tea out of a glass. She loves iced tea and crunchy Cheetos and will pester you to no end to get what she wants.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jun 20, 2021 14:14:50 GMT -6
What’s her name again? Iced tea and crunchy Cheetos. That’s hilarious. Mama doe has evidently decided that our new garden area is a safe place for her baby. I almost jumped out of my skin this morning when my husband I were talking about what we had recently added to the garden beds and what we still could add, and I realized that the fawn was actually inside the bed we were talking about. I found her before church, and she was still there when I went back out after church to snap the picture. I think she was huddled so close to the edge to try to stay in the shade. That was interesting to hear about the reflex spot of their backs.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 21, 2021 9:04:59 GMT -6
The yearling deer's name is, Stanley.
When baby deer are first born, it's really hard to tell what sex they are. My youngest son is the one who found her in the pond and brought her home for his mama look after. He thought it was a male deer because of the scent glands on its back legs and named it Stanley, so no one would call it "Bambie." Not sure what his reasoning was there?
Anyhow, as the weeks progressed, it became apparent that Stanley was a female, but the name stuck. So, now we have a little yearling doe named Stanley. She runs loose and can go anywhere she likes, but she seems to prefer 'home' over any of the pasture land adjoining our place. Maybe, because our house is situated in the woods, rather near a clearing?
I see her out there in the neighbor's 1,280 acre cow pasture quite often during the daytime, but she sleeps near our house and comes to see us nearly every day. She loves playing tag with our blue healer stock dog named, Ethos, but gets too rough for our big, black, watchdog, Peppy, who is at least twice the size of our blue healer. Peppy doesn't like Stanley and shies away every time he sees her because deer like to play using their front feet to paw in the air and Peppy doesn't want to have any part of that.
We have endless short clips of video taken of Stanley and Ethos playing tag in our yard. Stanley chases the dog as much as the dog chases her. It's really a lot of fun to watch, but you'd better be ready to get run over at any time. They get to playing so rowdy that they sometimes forget to look where they're going and have frequently plowed over the top of lawn chairs while frolicking. Fortunately, none so far have been occupied at the time.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jun 25, 2021 16:24:54 GMT -6
Stanley. That’s funny, too.
My five year old has named our little visitor “Fawn.” He/she was back for about the sixth time yesterday, but my little one got too close, and Fawn got up and hightailed it out of there. That’s the first time we’ve even seen him/her move. I wonder if that will be the end of the visits, or if she’ll be back.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 25, 2021 20:03:52 GMT -6
It's hard to say what a deer has on its mind when it gets up to leave. Many a time, we thought Staley had gone for good. Once, back in January of 2021; she disappeared for two solid weeks. I don't guess they take any stock in the fact that they worry us to death when they do things like that though. Every time we see her, we count it as a blessing.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 10, 2022 11:14:44 GMT -6
Stanley, the Deer is Back! My wife raised a baby deer on a bottle two years ago. Then, after she was weaned, we set her free. She used to come around nearly every evening at about 5:00 pm to see us, then after eating a few slices of sweet potato, some banana, a piece of candy, a few Cheetos, or whatever goody my wife had for her, she'd wander off into the woods again. Stanley was faithful with her daily visits until about the end of September of 2021, then one day, she just stopped coming by to see us. Since bow season started October 1st, my wife was just sure someone had killed her. She cried and cried.Then one day, out of the blue, Stanley came wandering by and the two of them had quite a joyous reunion. That lasted for a few days but was quite sporadic. We'd only see Stanley every few days at best. Then one day in November, Stanley just disappeared. Once again, it was deer season and we thought the worst.That was 6 months ago ... Then, yesterday, I was in the garden, planting okra seeds and heard a deer snort. I looked up to see a small doe running across the pasture with our dogs chasing it. I called off the dogs, but the deer kept going, though it never really flagged its tail in full alert or opened up full speed as it ran.When I called her name ... "STANLEY!" the deer cocked her ears toward me as she ran away (not a likely behavior for a wild deer).So I hurriedly came back inside and cautiously told my wife, "Don't get your hopes up, but I might have seen Stanley go running by the garden just now."My wife jumped up from her sewing, grabbed a pair of shoes, and ran to the door with a few treats in her hand!I didn't hold out much hope of her being able to call the deer back to her after not seeing it for a solid 6 months, knowing it had run into the woods until it was a hundred yards out of sight with two dogs chasing after it, but somehow, Margaret did it.We have a small bell hanging on a tree in our campground that we would ring last summer, every time we gave the deer treats, so she would associate the bell with good things. My wife has been ringing the bell every few days and calling Stanley's name to no avail all winter long, but the deer never came. For some reason, when My wife rang the bell this time, she saw Stanley pop her head up way back on the ridgeline above our house. My wife took off running and calling her name. Stanley slowly came down the ridge to meet her about halfway. I just stayed back to see them together again. Stanley just tolerates me being around, but she loves my wife, Margaret. Stanley has affectionately licked Margaret all over, since she was a baby. When the two of them met out in the woods the first thing Margaret hollered back to me was, "She still licks me!"The second thing she hollered was, "She's pregnant!"When I caught up to the two of them in the woods I could see the leg of the baby against the inside of Stanley's belly. Whenever my wife would touch Stanley's side, the baby would kick. What a wonderful day!Thank you, God, for bringing Stanley back home!
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 10, 2022 15:51:32 GMT -6
Another Happy Day! Today, I've been busy outside, replacing the steel door to our old deer pen. With Stanley the deer expecting a baby almost any day, I thought I'd better refurbish the old deer pen, just in case she needs a safe place to raise her new baby; a place where dogs and wild animals will not be a problem. The deer pen had a steel door that I put on it back in 2019, but the extra rainy weather has been pretty rough on it and it has been needing to be replaced all winter long. Having the deer return yesterday just gave me a reason to finally go do it.The deer pen was originally going to be a quail pen, so it's 50' feet long, 14' feet wide, and about 8' feet tall. That way, wild birds can fly freely inside. It's covered with chicken wire, with cattle panels nailed on every side to keep any stray dogs from tearing through the chicken wire. There is a treated 2x6 bolted around the bottom edge with chicken wire nailed to it and buried under the soil so nothing will dig under the edges and get in from underneath. It has a 10' foot wide sheet metal shelter built inside it to keep hay and things out of the weather and has a doghouse-sized enclosure in the center, so birds can nest inside. I just built the whole thing with salvage yard parts, so it has a 36" inch wide, used steel door off an old house that is pretty heavy and really looks out of place on a chicken-wire enclosure. Because the door is so heavy, it was a hot, noisy, busy job, so I never even noticed as Stanley the two-year-old deer came walking up to see what I was doing out there. That was a crazy thing to look up and see her standing there, after all of the noise I had been making out there sawing lumber, drilling holes, and banging in nails. Let me tell you, (when that little deer is curious, she's not afraid of anything)!Knowing that my wife would be just as excited to see Stanley today, as she was yesterday, I put the door back on the ground and hurried inside to tell Margaret that Stanley was back out there again! When she heard the good news, she ran to get some shoes on and took off outside where she has been ever since. That was about two hours ago. I got the door replaced with another one from the second-hand housing store and got the old weather rotted door loaded in the back of my truck to be recycled.
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Post by chrysanthemum on May 10, 2022 20:29:43 GMT -6
Those last two post made me get a little teary. It also made me wonder if Stanley’s coming back “home” is related to her being about to have her own baby.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 27, 2022 10:10:39 GMT -6
Stanley had her baby! I was busily planting peanuts in our garden last evening after the rain and heard a deer snorting way out in the woods about 75 yards away, so I put my seeds away and went to investigate the noise. A few minutes later, I found Stanley standing a few yards away, looking at our dogs and stamping her front feet on the ground. That's what she had been snorting at all along. The dogs were with me in the garden and Stanley had spotted them from that distance, so I caught them and put them on a leash in the shed.When I came back to the garden, I saw Stanley again. This time, I noticed that she was a lot thinner than she was the last time I saw her and that her udders were swollen with milk. Since I had quite a few peanuts handy, I called her to me to get a closer look. As she ate the peanuts, I looked her over and found she had already had her baby. Since it was so close to dark, we never got to see the fawn last night, but we plan to go looking for her again this morning when the dew dries up a little. It has been raining here for a solid week and the spot where Stanley hid her fawn is dense with underbrush and dripping wet with heavy dew.
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Post by chrysanthemum on May 29, 2022 15:29:32 GMT -6
I had hoped for an update on Stanley. Thanks.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Aug 3, 2022 13:38:09 GMT -6
I guess I forgot to mention that Stanley had twins. Sorry about that.
She brought both of her babies out for us to see them about a month ago, but by then, they were already so wild that we hardly have time to get a glimpse of either one of them before they both run back into the woods. I finally got a few photos of one of them, but so far, I've not had a camera with me when both of her babies show up at the same time (which isn't very often). We usually only see one of them before it sees us, and then it's gone!
It has been slim pickins around here since the drought killed all of our grass. If you enlarge these photos, you can get a better look at the baby. He was kind of far away for this thumbnail to do him much good.
The little guy in the background is so busy looking for a blade of grass that he hasn't noticed me yet.
If I sit real still, maybe he'll not see me?
He keeps inching a little closer with each bite. This was the last photo. As soon as the little one spotted me sitting there with the camera, he took off like a little wood sprite! Stanley doesn't mind though; she'll graze right up to whoever she sees, she loves people.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Aug 3, 2022 14:25:21 GMT -6
I’m surprised that they are so wild with their mother being so tame. I wonder if that will change with time as they follow Stanley up toward where you are. Here’s a fascinating story my husband once told me about. It’s about how deer still won’t cross the border between the former Czechoslovakia and West Germany even though none of the deer studied were alive at the time that there used to be an electric fence there. www.thevintagenews.com/2018/06/08/iron-curtain-fence/?safari=1
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Aug 3, 2022 14:56:38 GMT -6
Chrysanthemum,
That was a good story. Thanks, for sharing that. I wish I could teach our deer to skirt around my electric fence, they just blow right through it. My garden looks like a POW camp and I still have deer getting in it every day.
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