Late Summer, 2022
Harvest started and the growing season heat kept going strong. End of August, Pi returned. One morning I walked out onto the back deck, noticed a doe in the grapevines, assumed it was the Auntie, and ignored her. I made a little racket on the porch and saw the doe leaving out of the corner of my eye, but by the time I looked up to see which direction she was heading, she’d slipped mostly around the end of some vines where all I could see was a very brown back. It was too dark to be the Auntie (middle photo below). The next day or so, Pi and two fawns showed up for some late summer residence in the backyard.
The three photos below are a good example of how light and the physical position of the deer impact photos. Pi looks horrible in the left hand photo, which is the view I had when I first saw her, and it sickened me for a minute. She looked so thin. But in that photo, part of the odd look is because she’s stretched out funny reaching at food. She wasn’t wandering around all hunched over like that, though she did appear to be using her head more to get around than she did this time in 2021. But the middle photo shows some muscle, and she looks like a flipping pit bull in the right hand pic. So which is she? How did her health and her body hold up over winter, through pregnancy, and nursing fawns?
Pi and her fawns were here consistently for all of September, often bedding in the hidey hole at the end of the middle photo (below). It’s the hole at the end of the river bank grape row they use to exit to the river and to the neighbor’s yard. So again, they’re living in their food. That amuses me somehow. Halfway down the path in that pic, they can (and do) take a short cut through the flower garden to get to the other rows of grape vines. It’s still hot, so it’s a pretty good set up for a three-legged deer that needs to eat well and not expend a bunch of energy. The two photos on the far right are a short interval comparison of her butt and thigh on the injured side of her body. The later photo looks a little better even though the photos are two different stances. I saw it look a little better with my own eyes.
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