This Just In – Don’t leave the front door open for too long or the next thing “just in” will be Bambi and the family – in the house.
Yesterday, I was sitting in my living room and glanced out the window toward the driveway to find a young buck staring back at me. Hmm. “Whatcha lookin’ at?” I asked him. Incredibly, no answer.
I got up for a closer look (though I couldn’t really get much closer). He was within a dozen feet of the window. It felt like we were nose to nose compared to most deer encounters I’ve had. Many of those involve me being behind the steering wheel, but I digress.
As I stepped nearest to the window, I saw that he’d dropped by with the family. Six of them in all. Everyone nibbling on some form of weed that we allowed to grow too much in our summer of benign yard work neglect.
The babies are losing their spots but they’re far from fully grown. It was striking, though, that the adult deer were conspicuously underweight. I could count their ribs.
Deer in my area have a habit of dropping their newborn babies in our yard. The momma goes off for a few hours to find food and look for predators, then returns for the first steps in wobbly walking. It’s a treat we look forward to in the spring. We watch from a safe distance and never touch the babies. We don’t feed the deer in our neighborhood. We watch them … and they watch us.
I’ve had the misfortune of hitting and killing deer with my car more than once. It’s an awful experience to hit a living thing and watch it hurl through the air as a result. I was lucky in each instance that I wasn’t hurt and didn’t lose control of my car in either instance, but anyone this happens to has my sympathy.
For my daughter-in-law many years ago, it was quite a spectacular encounter, as she was driving back to her parents’ house, near Maple View Farm. In that case, the buck tried unsuccessfully to jump over her car and instead, crashed in through the windshield, coming to rest on the front seat beside her.
That was a big rack of angry, panicked spears on the seat right next to her. She smartly stopped the car immediately, put it in Park and jumped out – still running. The animal wriggled around, getting to the gas pedal and revving up the engine, stalling it. Eventually, he made his way out, leaving Jamie with a lot of broken glass, blood (thankfully, not hers) and fur to present her parents with a great story for why she was delayed coming home.
Deer move around the most at dusk, perhaps because that’s when it’s the most difficult to see them. Driving around our county at that time of day, it’s smart to shave a few miles per hour off your speed and expect to see them on the roadside, waiting for the worst moment to jump in front of your car. If you see one, you should expect two more as they’re seldom alone. They do respond to sound, so if you honk, they’ll flee.
We’re coming into breeding season for deer and this is when they move around the most. With the days growing shorter and dusk arrive earlier each day, it’s smart to stay alert for this particular seasonal hazard. Eyes open, everyone!
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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