one unsettling, one informative, one joyful.
INCIDENT ONE: Unsettling
The first “incident” involves both the Auntie and Pi’s little families. Together at the same time, they were trying to navigate the north property line path, which runs east to west between the river bank and the paddocks. It’s plenty wide for a doe leading twin fawns, but a tight fit for six deer at the same time— especially at one particular spot.
It occurred right as twilight was turning to dark. Not during twilight, but the very end of it, when you can’t see out the windows because its pitch black, but you go outside and there’s a micro-pinch of light left. But not for long. So it was bad timing and a tricky location. Oh. And they were going in opposite directions toward each other as they approached a bottleneck.
Pi was bringing in her fawns east from the paddocks toward the river bank, intending to go around a little snip of fence at the corner of the yard by the river and bed down on the bank or the edge of the neighbor’s field. The Auntie was bringing her fawns out of the backyard, west, to go bed in the paddocks. So, in the pic below, headed in the opposite directions along the big white arrows, they met in the purple scribbly spot. Except that I can’t see anything, I’m “watching” this from windows in the house that face the purple scratchy lines. In the pic below, the white dots are the path I took as the “incident” unfolded and the purple dots are the fawns’ eventual escape route (brown dots in field are them with Pi). The squiggling yellow arrow and x’s are a problem spot and an unanswered question about “the incident.”
Photo below shows what I’d see out the window if it weren’t for the pitch black. This is the spot the fawns run back and forth in. The path they’re on is a straight shot, not curved like the photo sort of makes it appear. The whole length is a meticulously built, well-maintained, strong wire fence the deer can’t through. Some stretches of it have barbwire on top. It’s the neighbor’s fence. There’s a section of old cedar, shown in the photo, attached to the fencing on my side. It’s a solid fence though you can hardly see it in the pic. On my side, the entire length of it is planted with trees and shrubs.
On the night of the incident, the windows were open and I suddenly heard a lot of commotion, just bodies moving type commotion, but a lot of bodies. And then one of the fawns started squealing its head off. From the patio windows, I could only see shapes running and moving and banging around in front of the cedar fence, but I’d bet money the two sets of fawns met up, someone got immediately playful, and pretty quickly one of Pi’s fawns (who seems to often view the world a bit dramatically) freaked out amongst all the bodies.
The freaked out fawn lost track of its mom, who had continued east on the path toward the river and into the neighboring field. The fawn stayed on the wrong side of the fence, ran back and forth by the windows, and eventually ran the wrong way up the path. The panicked fawn’s squealing and running around confused her twin, who then also lost the thread and ran the wrong way with the squealer instead of going to mom. Mom was vocalizing (bleating) at the fawns to follow her, but just not getting her “follow me” message across. The Auntie passed straight through the chaos and led her fawns into the paddocks without a hitch.
I knew I couldn’t do anything, but the fawn kept crying so I grabbed my phone (for the flashlight) and walked out the front door and headed toward where a new kind of ruckus was growing. Walking toward the head of the path the fawns were on, I could hear metal being smashed and trampled by little hooves, a lot, which meant they were in a not great spot. And now they were both crying. And Pi was still bleating from the other side of the fence. It was loud and disorienting for me, so it had to be way worse for the animals. But right before I rounded the corner to where the fawns were thrashing about, everything went silent. In one second, all the noise stopped.
The photos above show the spot the fawns were in, except that it was dark. In the left-hand photo, the funny looking fenced spot is a compost set-up. Next to the compost pit is the area in the center photo. It’s the only metal and tin over there, a neat pile of annoying garbage: a 50 gallon pressure tank, a metal box, and a disintegrating set of old wood nesting boxes. They’re stacked under the overhang of the tin roof of the “trash and recycle shed” pictured. The property line fence runs directly behind both the shed and the compost area, with no openings.
The fawns had jumped onto the pressure tank and needed multiple tries to get their footing onto the shed roof. The bottom of the tin roof in the pic is about five foot tall, the roof slope is short but pretty steep. The metal ruckus was them struggling with the roof and maybe even sliding back onto the pressure tank. As quick as the sound stopped, I’d bet they just finally flung themselves over the peak, jumping blindly into the field below. Their legs are still tiny, and I’d never looked at what the landing spot on the neighbor’s side is like, so, eek. But they’d jumped and they’d made it without injury (verified the next day). The white arrow in the middle photo above is the fawn’s mostly likely path up and over everything.
I climbed on that purple compost railing and then onto the roof and could just see Pi and the fawns further out in the neighbor’s field, silhouetted in grey against the dark. It looked like mom was grooming them a bit and then they started moving off together. That grey image of the doe and her fawns hangs in my head now, next to the coyote on the ice.
So I had a couple thoughts about this. First, I do not like hearing fawns cry. It’s way too universal a sound to not feel distress in response to it. Second, that could’ve ended badly. Third, I think the fawns saw the roof and went straight for it, but if the area had been better maintained, the deer would have had a safer route straight to the north end of the property where there are easy spots to pass through in the field that was their destination. Fourth, what? They spotted that random, tucked away pile of garbage and thought “that leads to up” and “up” will lead to our mom who we can’t see? Did their little brains see that spot and recognize in it the shape of a riverbank slope or a hill, something else they’d already encountered as “upward” leading? I am certain none of the deer have ever gone over that north fence in any way. You can call it instinct if you want, but there’s conscious intent going on there in the fawns’ actions. And information processing. And intelligence. I had not given near enough credit to their ability solve this problem when the squealing first started.
It’s also interesting that Pi didn’t stay at the intersection of the river bank and the fence. She could have called her fawns from there where they could have easily gotten around the fence like she had done. Or even come back up the inside of fence line to “get” them. But she didn’t. She tried to find her missing family members through the impenetrable fence. Limits to information processing? The turmoil of the moment? Just following the sounds of the fawns? It’s another piece of why I called this incident “unsettling.” I wondered if her choice to keep going without her fawns was a bit of a deficit in mothering capacity, making a choice about physical movement through some chaos. If it’s more difficult to navigate with three legs this year, she might be economizing how she moves about at times. Chaos in the dark seems a reasonable situation to economize. In the end, the fawns were fine, but I’d love to clear up the overgrown path that could have much more easily united doe and fawns.
Once you pass the compost spot, there’s actually a double path. Photo way above, left, shows one path along the chicken run, and photo on right shows the second path next to it, which runs through a double row of predominantly conifers and snowberry. Both paths become overgrown about 30 feet onward, but if cleared up would lead to a shaded shelter at the corner of the property populated with willow, white mulberry, a Siberian Pea Shrub, and some other stuff. In addition to opening up a shaded “clearing,” it would connect the east-west and north-south paths and greatly improve any deer’s access to a pathway through this part of the neighborhood. And the conifers are nice. I’d use that path to get around the property, too.
mostlyjoy.com 
Leave a comment