Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
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 wa-
ter, and our grandchildren, aged eleven and nine at the time, were allowed to hold the tiny fawn. Mean-
while, 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 un-
pleasant 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 at-
tacking 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 con-
servation 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 un-
common. 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
