Whitetail: Trophy, Food, or Friend?

A peaceful and increasingly rare sight on Indigo Hill--a doe keeping company with a crow, as the first morning gold streaks the meadow. Mid-June 2021

You may have noticed that my stories about the deer I know have dropped off the blog. No Ellen, no Buffy, no Flag or Pinky or Jolene, no TinyTine, no Lil' Pisser no mo. No buck sparring matches in the meadow. Where have they gone?

In the long view, hunting pressure has increased exponentially around my 80-acre sanctuary in the last five years. One 160-acre property that borders my land to the south and was closed to hunters for 30 years is now owned by avid hunters. That piece of land includes the house (the so-called Pink Palace) where Bill lived his last year. So there's that.

On the north neighboring side, multiple corn feeders, game cameras and a new feedplot are in use. A lot of animals are being taken.

A bit farther down the road is a 250-acre property that's also got feeders and feed plots, and is enthusiastically hunted. 

These pieces of land all connect; I've seen deer I know, like the magnificent buck TinyTine, both in my backyard and in the middle of that 250-acre piece. TinyTine has been gone for two years, taken, as I knew he would be. He had ten points; he showed up on the game cameras; he was marked. The allure of all those corn feeders is too great. While I am endlessly grateful that these properties are still in woodland and not, say, in housing developments, and I'd far rather have hunting lands neighboring mine than tract housing or drill sites, I can't fail to notice the impact of this newly intensive land use.

TinyTine (right) kisses an 8-point buck with whom he was just lightly sparring, Jan. 8, 2019. See the little lobster claws at the end of his main beam? Contrary to popular belief, bucks can stay good friends throughout the rut. They aren't at all the testosterone-blinded rage machines that pop hunting culture makes them out to be. Bucks, according to Joe Hutto, are tender, sensitive animals who often keep strong bonds with their mothers, and happen each year to grow large bony prongs people covet.

Needless to say, with all the change in land use, I've noticed a distinct drop in deer numbers. More than that, I don't recognize anyone any more. I miss the quiet, gentle neighbors I used to enjoy so much, but they're gone like April snow. Curtis went to investigate some piles of skins and skeletons strewn beside a nearby hunting cabin late last winter and came back home carrying Buffy's tail. 

How did I know? She was the only

deer I'd ever seen with a fox-red tail. Ellen's was red, too, but Buffy's was fox-red. That was a bad moment for me, looking down at Buffy's severed tail in my hand. But that, in a nutshell, is what it's like to fall in love with a deer. It isn't likely to end well.

Buffy had been Ellen's closest companion. They were either sisters or mother and daughter--I never knew which. Buffy took on Ellen's last two fawns, Pinky and Flag, when Ellen was killed at at least 9 years of age by a thoughtless arrow, and left in a sad little heap along my driveway in November 2016. Buffy cared for those fawns as if they were her own. I figure she had to be at least 13 when she was killed.

February 3, 2014. Buffy grooming Ellen.

And why was Buffy killed? Because she was there, and she didn't think to look up when she came to the corn feeder under their tree stand. They didn't know her like I did. They didn't know her at all.

I searched my computer, and I have 60 photos of Buffy, stretching from 2009 to 2018. Nine years is a long time to follow a deer, to fall in love, to see her through the seasons and a weeping, eventually ulcerated eye that somehow got better; to see her through everything else that happens to a wild deer. The feelings I had toward the deer who lived here are what make me bite my tongue nearly in two when I interact with some of my neighbors. Suffice it to say we are at cross purposes, and I am outnumbered.

I've just finished reading Joe Hutto's book, Touching the Wild: Living with the Mule Deer of Deadman Gulch. Most will remember Hutto from "My Life as a Turkey," a PBS TV re-enactment of his experience incubating and raising chicks from a clutch of wild turkey eggs he found, about to hatch but abandoned. The incandescent book he produced from the experience of following the poults through the woods, watching them grow in wisdom and experience, is one that has shaped me greatly. It's called Illumination in the Flatwoods. I read it when it first came out in 1995 and was never the same again. I'll say the same about this book.

Touching the Wild hit me hard, kept me up at night, thinking. If you like your natural history sugar-coated, you won't like this book. But then, if you liked things that way, you probably wouldn't be here, reading my stuff. It's not always sweet. There are the occasional severed tails.

That said, if you'd like to know something of what goes on between doe and fawn, in the heads and hearts of these remarkable creatures, I highly recommend it. It is humbling to learn how utterly out of touch humans, whether hunters, wildlife managers, or observers, are with the minds and souls and welfare of the animals they profess to "know," "harvest," and "conserve." Hutto was himself once a hunter. Enough said. Mr. Hutto, I am your kid sister in Ohio, and I watch my wild neighbors with the same raw and oft-broken heart that guides you. I don't feed them, and I can't touch them, but I feel for them.

So in that context, when I, weeding the garden, got an alert from my phone that my Moultrie trailcam had new photos just a few hundred yards down the meadow, I was gobsmacked to see these thumbnails roll in. Yes, I have a trailcam setup, gifted to me by Bart Stephens of Wingscapes.com, which sends real-time alerts on my iPhone when something interesting walks by my trailcam.

This was interesting. And I was staring down the meadow from my east hill, knowing this was unfolding, unseen...it's so freaking cool.

I didn't know the doe at the time, but I instantly empathized with her. You'll have to look at the timestamps on the photos to understand why this series of photos hit me so hard. As my (noble and ethical) hunter friend Matt Mullenix commented, "No coincidences there."

She stood sentinel

Six minutes by the camera’s count

Her fawn sporting in circles

I, gratefully spying with magic electrons.

Finally it was time.

Her fawn fed, she bedded it down

Scentless and warm

Where she hoped no tooth or claw would find it.

That’s a doe’s life, isn’t it?

Nothing but gamble and hope.

Trying again, year upon year.

Today was all right. 

We'll see about tomorrow.

I wrote this post in mid-June 2021, moved by the story that unfolded in snapshots before my eyes. I am happy to say that both the doe and fawn made it, and I watched that little thing grow all summer and fall, almost always running as it passed the camera. I wish it luck in the naked, weepy woods of November, with the booms of men sighting in their guns for the upcoming season echoing all around. I'm bracing for another hunting season. Each year, it gets harder for me to endure. Like many Americans, I've been thinking a lot about guns lately, and now I'm hearing them all around again. It's that time of year.

What I'm trying to convey with these stories is that, despite the attitude some hold, hunters don't own the privilege of being in the woods, or knowing something about deer. That sounds a bit odd, but you have to place it in the context of my being a lone woman with gray coming into her hair, who has lived here for nigh on 30 years, surrounded by hunters, and now moreso than ever. Unlike most people in this area, I go out into the woods nearly every day of my life, all year around--not just for a few weekends in November. When I interact with hunters and I'm treated, as I sometimes am, with disrespect and bluster, even shouted at as I make my way through the woods, it freezes something down inside me, hard and still as rock. Hunters are not the only people who belong in the woods, or know something of what goes on there. Nor do they have dominion over the earth or its animals, whatever the dogma states. Their weapons don't make them king. They only make hunters something to which I and the animals must give a wide berth. Most demand my deference with firepower and nothing more. Only a very few will ever earn my respect. They know who they are. And only they know why it's something worth earning.

Tell me something I don't know about deer. Tell me something about the does I knew and followed for a dozen years before you killed them. Tell me about their children, about the small white flash between their toes that told me they were Ellen's. Did you notice that? Tell me about the soft-eyed buck who came up to my studio window just as he had as a fawn: Ellen's son, all grown up. About the long looks we exchanged, the pictures of his mother that I saw in his eyes. He nosed the feeders, sipped from the bird bath. He knew he was safe with me. How many points did he have? How much did he dress out to? Tell me what you know about deer, you who descend for a few weeks or days each year and shoot them over piles of muddy corn.

I'm here, watching.

Here, listening.

Here, learning.

If you're intrigued by my setup, go to the Wingscapes website to find Moultrie Mobile trailcams set up for AT&T or Verizon, that will send lo-res thumbnails right to your phone in real time. When you get a keeper, you can click on it and download the hi-res version to your phone or computer, which I did for this blogpost. These cameras will be available soon at Wingscapes, and they are available now at BassPro, Cabela's,Dick's, Sportsman's Warehouse and Academy. They will be in Walmart soon as well. If they're not available on the Wingscapes website, please feel free to buy from any of the other outlets listed.

I can attest that it's exhilarating to get those notices that Something has just walked by your trailcam; to see what's stirring in the middle of the night, and sometimes, if you're very lucky, to piece together a story like this one. I'd never have known this was happening but for my Moultrie Mobile camera! Many thanks to Bart Stephens for setting me up with the latest and greatest technology for my studies.

All On a Summer's Morning

Every morning, Curtis Loew and I tromp out the meadow to see what we can see. June 12 was his seventh day of nursing a deeply gashed hind pawpad, and I have been pleased to see him using the foot a little more each day. This morning, he'd even done a short, frisky run on all fours as we embarked. He was coming back. You can't suture a pawpad; you just have to let it heal from within, and I could tell the process was extremely painful, as he held that foot up for nearly two weeks as he three-legged around the place. He spent most of the week sleeping indoors, which I thought was great timing, given the presence of a wobbly new fawn on the place. I try to see the bright side in every misfortune. Maybe Curtis' loss would be that beautiful doe's gain. 

First stop was the right meadow box, where my favorite pair of bluebirds, the ones who had a clutch by April 1 (!!) are well on their way with a second brood. Listen to how they peep as they hear me scratching at the door, but shut up instantly when they realize it's Big Mama, and not their real mom. Consciousness is creeping into the heads of these five-day-old babies. 

 

Finding all well there on this foggy morning with an indigo bunting singing and Curtis finishing his morning ablutions, I move on. 

Next we check a box with unhatched eggs. Then it's on to the lower path, where ten-day-old house wrens, six of them! await a check. It's always a kick in the pants to have bright shiny eyes looking back at me. 

My heart races as I think about how soon they will be fledging. Yikes! They've got two, maybe three more days in the nest and then boom! out they'll go. Hence my little woooo at the end of the video.

 

Curtis trots ahead of me, and I spot a surprise just as he gets wind of it. What a beautiful little turtle, her beak all sludged up with slug. I love to see them feasting on escargot --this is probably Arion subfuscus--on a nice foggy good-for-slugs-and-turtles morning. Her markings look like Chinese characters to me. Shiny-smooth, black and beautiful she is. It's a bit early for laying eggs, but the females spend wet mornings prospecting for open soil, testing it with a tentative dig.

A great spangled fritillary struggles up out of the grass as I approach. It's hard for butterflies to fly when it's coolish and wet, but it manages.The cardinal, indigo bunting and peewee cheer it on. How beautiful it is, blundering in the wet grass. And how high and thick the meadow has grown in a short month and a half! Lush! with habitat and hiding places for all.

It's going to be absolutely amazing by August.

I note with great satisfaction that the ragged fringed orchid Platanthera lacera that I found as it emerged this spring and immediately caged against herbivores is finally in bloom. I saw a rolled lance-shaped fleshy leaf and thought, "That looks like it's gonna be an orchid!" My next move was to walk to the garage for three old rusty tomato cages to stack over it, to keep deer and rabbits from nipping it off. As they do.

Isn't that cool? It's a life orchid for me! I've seen the purple fringed and the yellow-fringed (which is actually the color of a Dreamsicle, no joke), but this is my first ragged-fringed. Whoot! And it's in my orchard!

Update: The count is now up to 16, all in the orchard's deep shade but one. And that one?

It came up on an unmown patch right at the head of Bill's grave. I was absolutely thunderstruck to see it. Hundreds of yards away from any other, baking out in the hot sun...what was it doing there, other than saying, Hey Zick! I love you!

Curtis turns off the trail and heads into the meadow, a move that always makes me nervous. The hair on his spine is standing up; that usually signifies that he smells coyotes, or that he's otherwise unpleasantly alarmed. The way he circles and circles a big patch of higher vegetation makes me think he has a largeish animal in there. Uh-oh. I'm thinking fox. Coon. Skunk. Sandworm. I don't know. 

He makes a little stomp-lunge and a little whitetail fawn stands up, unable to hold its stance any longer.

I immediately collar Curtis and pull him away. I also immediately pick up that there's something wrong.

If you click on the photo you can see that the poor sweet thing has been injured already. Such a short life, and already something has had it. There's a puncture wound on its forehead, and blood in front of its left ear. 

I know it can't be Curtis who did that, because he's been indoors for a week--this is his first real outing.

Trailcam photo from early this morning shows the coyote is still out and about, hunting this wee baby.

Honestly, how do any of them survive? And how did this one get to the point of being grabbed by its head, and SOMEHOW escape? Did Mama pummel the coyote away from her fawn? Or was it something smaller, maybe a bobcat? I can only imagine. But what a rough and merciless entry into its world this fawn has had.

Oh, the night holds such terror for deer. I comforted myself by studying the photo and noting that it appeared the fawn's wounds had been licked clean by the doe. She licked them until they stopped bleeding. Undoubtedly it was she who saved it, and she who cleaned it up, and she who calmed it  and laid it down in the meadow. Had she not, it would be in a coyote's belly by now. I can only shake my head in wonder.

I snapped the photo and immediately walked a reluctant Curtis to the house. As we walked away, I watched the fawn slowly sink, like a grebe, back into the vegetation. Only days old, and already showing such wisdom.  Like a child at a bus stop, it has to wait for its mother. If it leaves, she might not find it.

Later, Curtis and I went back outside. I did my morning routine, keeping a close eye on Curtis. Not once, but three times over the course of the next hour, that dog watched me out of the corner of his eye, and when I seemed sufficiently involved in a pursuit, he tiptoed out toward the meadow. Three times I stopped him dead as he set foot on the meadow path with an AH-AH-AH!! --his least favorite sound in the world besides running bathwater. So much for those who think dogs can't plan ahead, or remember past goals. This one is a plot- hound.

He is sneaky, and he is a hunter to the core. He would not hesistate to kill this fawn, I know. 

So I stepped my surveillance up a notch.

I set his Marco Polo tracking unit, which keeps a connection to an electronic tag on his collar, to CLOSE, and turned the alarm on for the first time ever. If Curtis went outside a boundary considered close to the house, an alarm would sound until he returned. There is no shocking involved whatsoever--just tracking. 

When he's lying in his chaise longue under the Japanese maple, there's a 55% signal in the kitchen, where the base unit stays. 

Let him leave that circle, let the signal fade to 25%, and the alarm shrills. It works!

My job was to keep him under surveillance all day, until the doe could feed and move her fawn tonight. She would doubtless stay with it all night. 

Curtis Loew, you are being watched. 

He spent the afternoon either at my side outdoors or inside as I wrote. 

I was once again grateful, in an odd way, for his hurt paw. He was less likely to strike out on his own with a sore paw.

For out in that meadow, a wee fawn lies,

 waiting for its mother to return.