My boyfriend and I were out walking the ferret today. (This is the sort of thing that we do in our relationship. We grow closer by taking my small mustelid for jaunts in the woods, and other such absurdities.) I suddenly became aware that a whitetail doe was standing about 200 feet from me, in a clearing deeper in the woods. She was looking at me intensely and snorting, and I stood up and took a look at her.

My family's become familiar with this doe. She's decided in the past week that our property belongs to her. This makes sense; it's a secluded, wooded area with a lot of growth. But I've never known a deer to be so fixated on a spot. We've been seeing her easily twice a day, grazing in the woods, flitting across the driveway. She's easily recognizable. She's very pretty, even for a species of pretty animals, leggy with huge ears and black startled eyes.

Anyway, there she was, snorting at me and being oddly conspicuous for a deer. As a rule, deer freeze, or they high-tail it out of your vicinity, but not this one. I turned to Matt.

"We are near her fawn," I said.

This is very exciting to me. Does will bed down their newborns in the underbrush and go off to feed for long periods of time, during which the fawns stay very still and extremely difficult to see. I loved Marty Stouffer videos when I was young. There was one video where the doe tried to lure the camera crew away from her hidden fawn by stamping and snorting at them, and this is what my doe was doing, I'm almost sure. When she realized I had noticed her, she let out an explosive bark, sort of a choked caw, and bounded into the deeper forest (hunters call this sound a bawl, and deer regularly make it when they are injured. It makes sense that she would try to lure us away with this; Kildeer birds do the same thing. Parents pretend that they are injured so that predators will follow them, because an injured animal is much easier to catch).

As long as we were out there, she repeated this activity. I would look up, and there she would be again, watching me expectantly, and she'd bawl and fling herself back into the forest, only to tiptoe back to see if I had followed her. She was the picture of maternal anxiety. It was grand. There's a fawn bedded down in my forest somewhere (and I have a vague idea now of where it might be, since it's in the opposite direction of where she was trying to lead us today). I won't go looking for it though. I want her to feel that this is a safe place to raise her young, and hopefully she will stay around here even after the fawn is old enough to walk around with her. She is a good mother, this much I know; she was willing to entice potentially dangerous predators (Matt is terrifying ) away from her fawn by putting herself at risk.

I'm ridiculously excited. I love deer, and fawns define the word "cute". We're debating names for the doe, by the way. My mom came up with Guinevere, which is is, oddly, a name I like very much (and could potentially be spelled "Gwendabhair." Those kooky Celts). My dad likes Gwendolyn better. I like 'em both. They seem nymphy and forest-ish. The name of King Arthur's queen seems appropriate, to me, for a doe that would risk her own life to save her child. Does anyone have ideas for me?



I love spring

Update: I brought the ferret out for a walk again today, and there she was, in the same place, in the sunlit brush. Only this time--and it was so far away that I could barely see--a little one was following her, his form made indefinite by the sun and brush, but he was there. So. I was right.

I went back out to the same spot later today. After about ten minutes, I spotted an orange tone in the underbrush. It was her, again. It feels sort of like a gift, finding her there; it's really fun. A sort of hide and seek. She was aware of my presence and swiveled her ears towards me. I stayed still and talked to her. This is my strategy for gaining the trust of wild animals; three things that I've noticed threatens them are movement, being low to the ground, and when you try to be quiet; these are all things that predators do. If you stay very calm and quiet in your motions, but talk in a way that they can hear, it seems to convey to them that you are indeed aware of their presence, but have no intention of doing anything to them. It worked. She got curious about me and came within thirty feet of me, stood and stared before turning and heading back to the deep glade, where I expect her fawn is hiding now.


I'm having a lot of fun. My mother and I call her Guinevere, and my dad calls her Gwendolyn. I suspect she should just be Gwen. But the fawn needs a name.