As you know, I am by profession, a landscape gardener. I have planted and nursed a beautiful setting on my homegrounds since I and my family moved here in 1974.
One morning that decade or two ago shortly after dawn, I was walking along a path slightly downhill rather dreamily to a pond to plant some perennials along its path. It was a dead quiet time of a gorgeous Minnesota morning.
I heard a srange noise…..a kind of a whine, a ‘hhheeeeeeeheeee’ to my left.
Wow! Here, nearly next to me was this full grown doe standing among some shrubs blending into the scenery without moving a muscle! She was holding her ground!
I was shocked!….. She repeated her noise, and again didn’t retreat and run off as would always be the deer habit on my grounds.
She was looking to my right and appeared more puzzled than afraid. And then I spied what caused her not to run. Still mostly in its placenta sac, lying among the garden leaves, was this peculiar object poking and poking.
I have never talked to this particular kind of deer before, except to yell, “SCRAM….GET OUT OF HERE!” when one would chew on my yews. This meeting was different. I appologized out loud profusely to her, and slowly backed up along the path on which I had arrived.
I was afraid she might abandon ‘the thing’. That this was a fawn poking around, was clear. But to me, it was still ’a thing’.
I backed up to snoop from behind a small oak, to see what ‘mom’ would do.
I was thrilled as she became calm and slowly moved toward her ‘baby’. She chewed away the remaining sac and began licking its content which was still poking its legs here and there.
In a few minutes ‘the thing’ stood up and wobbled just as you see it on the video. Mom licked a bit more as baby moved left and then right. After another few minutes baby, now fawn, started looking cocky and proud, and after a nudge from mom’s nose…..they took off together through my grounds as if they had been friends for years.
Click below: