Owls Aren't Wise and Bats Aren't Blind (43 page)

Curiosity got the better of me, and I finally entered the woods to seek the source of this unusual noise. It took me some little time and considerable quiet sneaking about, because the sound had a ventriloquial quality, seemingly coming first from one spot and then from another. Finally, however, I saw an obviously very young fawn standing in an area of ferns that over-topped it by a considerable margin.

I backed quietly away, returned to the house, and called Gordon Marcelle, our local game warden. I told him that the fawn’s prolonged bleating over two days struck me as abnormal, and that it seemed likely something had happened to its mother. He replied that fawns with healthy mothers had occasionally been known to bleat a great deal. He counseled patience and said that if the bleating continued the following day, he would come to pick up the fawn.

The bleating resumed the next day, I phoned the warden, and soon he and his wife appeared, carrying a baby bottle with a sugar-water mixture in it. Warden, wife, and I, followed by our two grandchildren, soon located the tiny fawn, sound asleep at the base of a tree. The warden examined the little creature, which offered no resistance, and said there was no evidence that the fawn had been fed, indicating that it was orphaned.

We all adjourned to our living room, where Mrs. Marcelle induced the fawn to take a little sugar water, and our grandchildren, aged eleven and nine at the time, were allowed to hold the tiny fawn. Meanwhile, I busily took photographs and my wife admired the beautiful little creature, whose tiny hooves were no larger than my thumbnail. The fawn, the warden told us, would be taken to a veterinarian who would care for it in such a manner that it could eventually be returned to the wild, rather than becoming a pet. This was an outcome that pleased us greatly.

This isn’t the end of the story, however. Eight or ten days later I noticed two turkey vultures flying low near our house. The big scavengers have gradually worked their way up to northern Vermont, and we usually see them at low level a time or two each summer, so I attached no special significance to their presence. Even when the pair landed for a few minutes in an evergreen tree near where we found the fawn, I failed to comprehend the reason for their behavior. Then, three or four days later, the putrid odor of a large, decaying animal began to assail us when the wind blew from the woods toward our house. As the smell grew worse, I finally went in search of its source and, after a lot of decidedly unpleasant sniffing and searching, found the badly decayed remains of a rather small deer not fifty yards from where we had found the fawn.

It wasn’t difficult to make some valid deductions. Almost certainly, this was the mother of the orphaned fawn. There was no sign that she had been attacked by predators, and a doe would lead attacking dogs or coyotes far away from her fawn anyway, even if they had been able to catch and kill her. From her small size, it seemed probable that she was barely a year old and the fawn was her first. Very likely something went wrong during birth, and the young doe bled to death at or very near the birth site. Such things happen more than we may realize in the natural world, although we’re seldom aware of them.

Despite the occasional fawn that is truly orphaned, there’s a very clear message regarding fawns found without a mother in sight: DON’T pick them up and take them home! Instead, call your local conservation officer or game warden. He or she can check on the situation and take appropriate action— although in most cases no action is required. Usually the doe is either feeding some distance away or is lurking in the brush just out of sight, waiting for the human intruder to leave so that she can retrieve her baby.

This leads to a third common fallacy about fawns—that once humans have handled one, its mother will abandon it. There is a small grain of truth in this notion, but only a
very
small one. Does have indeed been known to abandon fawns that have acquired a dose of human scent, but this is very uncommon. According to John Ozoga, who has handled hundreds of fawns, a fawn born so recently that it’s still wet will retain more human scent than a dry one. Likewise, he says, a young doe with her first fawn is more likely to be skittish of human scent than an older, more experienced doe. Usually, it takes the combination of a yearling mother and handling a wet, newborn fawn to trigger abandonment.

More common are instances in which wardens or biologists have taken an “orphaned” fawn from someone who has picked it up, carried it back to the place where it was found, and then hidden nearby to await results. In most cases the doe showed up—sometimes after the fawn had been absent for as long as two or three days—and accepted her offspring with no apparent concern for any human scent.

The subject of supposedly orphaned fawns is an excellent place to introduce another common misunderstanding—that deer make good pets. Taking a fawn, genuinely orphaned or not, and raising it as a “pet deer” is a thoroughly bad idea that usually ends in great unhappiness for all concerned. There are several reasons for this. The first is that in most states it’s illegal for unqualified people to keep wild mammals. Such laws exist for extremely valid reasons, which should be sufficient grounds for obeying them.

Second, what usually happens is that someone finds an “abandoned” fawn and raises it for a few months, even a year or two, and then the state wildlife agency hears about it. Conservation officers arrive and remove the deer over the outraged and tearful protestations of the family, and everyone loses. The unfortunate deer is no longer fit for release into the wild, the family is both sad and angry, and the wildlife agency people, no matter how carefully they handle the affair, are almost invariably accused of “Gestapo tactics.”

Third, “pet” deer can be extremely dangerous. Although a great many people, especially those who are raising a so-called pet deer, simply can’t believe such a lovely, gentle creature would ever harm them, the fact is that every year individuals are seriously injured, or even killed, by their gentle “pet.”

Bucks are more dangerous than does, of course, because of their antlers, which can easily puncture a person. They’re also apt to be especially rambunctious during the fall mating season. But even seemingly docile does can be unpredictable and turn on their keepers in an instant, slashing with sharp hooves that can do great damage. The bottom line is that wild animals, including deer, are just that—wild. Even though they may seem domesticated, they’re still inherently wild, and no one should attempt to make pets of them!

A doe’s milk is extremely rich—far richer than cow’s milk—and fawns grow with astonishing rapidity. No doubt this is an evolutionary trait which ensures that fawns will be large enough by late autumn to survive the harshness of winter. Within a month, fawns have already tripled their birth weight and are also eating plant materials. After roughly two and a half months they can survive without their mother’s milk, although they’ll continue to nurse somewhat less frequently for another two or three months.

By late summer, fawns gradually lose their spots and begin to look much like smaller editions of the adults. Total weight by late autumn is largely a function of nutrition, but genetics certainly plays a role. In northern areas, fawns average seventy to eighty pounds, but they can grow much larger under ideal conditions. In rich farm country, where there’s an abundance of high-quality feed all summer, fawns may run ninety to one hundred pounds after six months, and exceptional specimens may weigh more than 150 pounds.

The weights of adult whitetails, as well, are strongly affected by nutrition and genetics—but there’s an added complication, known as Bergman’s Rule. Simply stated, Bergman’s Rule holds that members of a species grow larger as distance from the equator increases.

The theory behind this rule is that larger animals have less surface area in comparison to their body weight, thereby conserving energy in cold weather. The scientific basis for this theory can be tested quite easily. Take a quart container, fill it with hot water of a known temperature, and put the cover on. Do the same with four half-pint containers, using water of identical temperature. Let the containers stand for an hour, and then check the temperature in the large container and one of the small ones.

Whether or not evolution was actually guided by this principle, northern deer are clearly much larger than their southern counterparts. A fully mature adult buck in a northern-tier state often weighs 250 pounds or more. In fact, the live weights of two enormous bucks from far northern Minnesota—one in 1926 and another in 1982—were estimated at an incredible 511 pounds! In contrast, 150 pounds might be more typical of a buck of the same age in, say, the Carolinas, while Key deer, a whitetail subspecies of southern Florida, tip the scales at well below one hundred pounds.

Despite the occasional super-whitetail, however, most deer are far smaller than people realize, especially in height. Although their slender legs and long, graceful necks may give the impression of height, most adult deer stand only three to three and a half feet high at the shoulder—which is a lot smaller than the impression they give. To put this in perspective, an adult whitetail with its head lowered can pass beneath the body of a full-grown moose.

Considering the enormous fascination that deer hold for humans, it’s not surprising that a plethora of fallacies and myths have grown up around them. Some are obviously old, but others are of more recent vintage. The latter result from the steady migration of people off the land and into the cities and suburbs. Someone who has observed deer only in backyards, parks, and similar settings inevitably has less understanding of these animals’ extraordinary capabilities than someone who has experienced them in their traditional wild milieu. Two examples demonstrate this point rather vividly.

During my days with the National Wildlife Federation, our headquarters received a letter from a very angry and upset lady who lived near a thirty- or forty-acre piece of land that had recently been donated to our organization. The previous fall, a forester from a highly reputable consulting firm had contacted me to discuss a small logging operation, which he would supervise. I had walked that land and felt that his proposal would improve both the wildlife habitat and the quality of the forest.

The letter writer, a recent émigré from suburbia, alleged that the beauty of the forest had been destroyed, and she feared that the deer would “break their delicate legs in the slash.” Envisioning a logging job that had turned into a debacle, I phoned the forester, who assured me that the logger had done an excellent job.

In the end, the forester and I met with the woman, accompanied by two or three neutral parties, in an effort to resolve the dispute. What we found was one of the cleanest logging operations I’ve ever seen. The loggers had removed only the limited amount that the forester had described. All of the tops and slash had also been carefully lopped, so that nearly all of it was flat on the ground; most of what the woman termed “slash” actually consisted of a few slender saplings that had been bent over by the winter’s snow.

This woman was far from stupid. In fact, I was quite impressed with the knowledge that she had acquired in a short time concerning deer in the locality. She had invested considerable time and effort tracing their trails to see when and where they moved through the area, and had learned much about their movements. Nevertheless, she had no frame of reference by which to judge either the logging job or the strength of a deer’s legs.

Although she meant well, her fear that deer would “break their delicate legs” in almost nonexistent slash was wildly misplaced. Anyone who has seen much of deer in the wild knows better. I’ve witnessed deer bounding at high speed with perfect safety and apparent ease through logging slash so thick and deep that a person could barely clamber over and crawl through it. Likewise, I’ve seen whitetails racing up, down, and sideways at top speed along steep, rocky hillsides where a person could barely navigate.

In sharp contrast with the notion of deer as delicate creatures, I was presented with a graphic demonstration of their astonishing toughness and durability. While driving one day, I suddenly saw three does running over a rise to my left, and I had to brake sharply when they leaped across the road just in front of me. As I watched them bound down the bank to my left and across an open pasture to the woods beyond, a fourth doe suddenly flashed across the highway, following the route of the first three.

Near the base of the slope on the left stood the remnants of an old fence, a single strand of barbed wire still firmly attached near the top of a line of weathered cedar fenceposts. As the doe fled down the embankment, she turned her head to look back at me.

When she snapped her head forward again, the wire caught her under the chin in mid-leap. The result was quite astonishing: held by the chin, the doe swung like a pendulum so that she was upside down, head pointed back toward me.

The next instant, as the full force of her momentum took hold, the wire slid over her chin and she went rocketing through the air, bottomside up, to land on her back with a horrendous impact many feet away. The thought had no sooner flashed through my mind that this was one very dead deer when she whirled to her feet and galloped off into the woods, unscathed. So much for the fragility of the white-tailed deer!

Winter in northern portions of the whitetail’s range is the time of maximum stress, when only the fittest may survive the combination of deep snow and bone-chilling cold. Despite the rigors of this season, however, deer are by no means defenseless against its perils. For starters, abundant autumn feed in good habitat allows the deer to put on a layer of dense, tallowy fat. The energy stored in this fat is a reserve that can be drawn on during the long, cold months, and may be crucial to survival in an especially severe winter.

Wildlife biologists realized this many years ago, and also learned that the very last of the fat reserves to be depleted are those in the marrow of the large bones. This led to a very quick, simple test to determine whether a winter-killed deer died of malnutrition and its associated effects or from some other cause. A biologist simply breaks open the femur (thigh bone), and inspects the marrow within. If the deer was well nourished when it died, the marrow will be white and fatty, almost like suet. If the deer was moderately malnourished, the marrow will have a pinkish tinge and will be somewhat less solid and fatty. But if the deer was badly malnourished, the marrow, lacking any fat, will be thin and red—almost the color and consistency of red jello. In fact, the marrow of a deer in the final stages of malnutrition is so thin that it can be spread on a printed page and the print read right through it!