From behind the glass door of my house I saw a doe nibbling at some plants in my overgrown yard. She was a big, white-tailed deer, well muscled and wearing a healthy looking sienna-colored coat, but she seemed a little too tired to project the usual wariness of a wild animal. Her belly was noticeably concave, and her hip bones jutted out.
Whatever I was doing took me to an upstairs room overlooking a steep hillside. From a window up there, I saw that the deer had moved into the knee-deep ferns, vines, and yellow daylilies on the hill. Her head was bent low, buried in the foliage. She appeared to lick something on the ground. The greenery rustled and a dark auburn bit of color with white spots moved and took the shape of a fawn’s body and head. The fawn’s large dark eyes looked ancient and new, both all-knowing and not knowing, like the eyes of all newborns.
With shaky determination, it struggled to stand on its spindly legs and weak haunches. The doe sat, slightly downhill in the ferns, watching the fawn’s efforts but not assisting. Its movements were barely under control, yet the fawn began to explore its little patch of earth. It investigated a hole under a fallen tree trunk, peering into it and sniffing. I wondered how it was able to stand and walk on the steep hillside without tumbling over.
Eventually the doe led the wobbly fawn down the slope and onto the grass of the lawn. After some nose-to-nose communication between mother and offspring, a little bit of milk for the fawn, and some cleansing licks from the doe to wipe away any telltale scents, they slowly walked across the grass and disappeared into a thicket.
Once they were overshadowed by the plants of the dense thicket, the mother, as is a typical behavior, may have left the fawn hidden there while she went off to feed and get water, necessary to produce the milk, which has three times the protein and fat of most cows. I never saw the fawn again although I did get a last glance of the doe standing alert in the nearby woods.
I felt fortunate to be observing this mother and fawn interaction and the active, inquisitive behavior of a fawn. A few years ago, I saw a newborn fawn from another upstairs window in the house. Its behavior contrasted with this recently observed fawn by lying perfectly still, its head and ears flattened, in its bed of vinca, lily of the valley, and other spring plants. It stirred only when signaled by its mother from a short distance away, who would then approach so the fawn could nurse. And then one day the mother came, made a sound, and the fawn stood up and disappeared into the forest with her.
Although I have only had the opportunity to observe single newborn fawns, white-tailed deer often give birth to twins. The mother hides them separately, thus increasing their chances for survival from predators. Mary Holland in “Naturally Curious: A Photographic Field Guide and Month-by-Month Journey through the Fields, Woods, and Marshes of New England,” states that within a month, the mother will have reunited the fawn and its sibling, if there is one, with the doe’s yearling daughters, the male yearlings having been coerced to strike out on their own.
Witnessing these mother-fawn interactions produced the most maternal feelings in me. After all, fawns are about the same size as a human baby, between 5 and 7 pounds, more or less. And adult deer are also similar in size and weight to adult humans. I can see eye-to-eye with a deer, much as I can with many fellow human beings, and deer have that habit of appearing to stare at our faces, as though waiting for a response. The grace with which they move has a purposeful quality that appears almost consciously intentional. The comparison of their movements to ballet is inescapable.
Today, while walking in the Holy Hill conservation land, I was entering the woods from the open field when I heard a noise like someone coming from behind. When I stopped to step aside and look back, a deer, snorting and bounding, each “grand jete” suspended in midair for an instant before landing, veered into the woods. After the deer passed by, I started to continue down the trail, but the deer had stopped, and was now facing me, maybe even approaching.
Now that I had become so recently aware that this is the deer birthing season, my first thought was that I may have wandered into a place where a fawn was hidden and, not knowing how defensive a mother deer could be, I diverted off the trail planning to take another route through the neighborhood. But before leaving the woods entirely, I looked back to check on the deer when I saw two exuberant Labrador retrievers, unleashed, tearing up the trail from the opposite direction. At the edge of the field they stopped to poke their noses into tufts of grass, searching intently for interesting scents. Soon their owner, looking down at her phone, came into view and then all three proceeded through the field.
Margaret Kusner, a regular contributor to the Press, hikes Harvard’s trails and closely observes the animals and plants that share our community.
