Journal of a Sabbatical

September 17, 1998

a doe and two fawns

Copyright © 1998, Janet I. Egan

doe and two fawns as seen from the road

Sometimes life still amazes me. I was driving down the dirt road in the refuge and had to stop for a doe in the middle of the road. Another car coming the other way also had to stop. The doe stood there, smack in the middle of the road for several minutes. As I was fishing my camera out of my pack, a fawn came bounding out of the brush on the east side of the road (the beach side) and joined the doe in the middle of the road. A few more minutes went by and another fawn appeared from the same direction. Once both fawns had caught up with their mother, the whole family leaped off the road and into the field across the street. The fawns could only be described as gamboling. Their white tails waved in the air like little celebratory pennants. They danced and gamboled while the mother grazed placidly. It was only after they'd done quite a bit of running around that they started grazing too.

one of the fawns as seen from the pines trail

What amazed me was that I still did that quick intake of breath in the presence of beauty. Deer are commonplace, and to some people unwelcome because they host the tick (Ixodes dammini) that carries Lyme disease. They have so overpopulated Plum Island that you sometimes see starving deer roaming around in the winter because they've eaten just about everything they can find already. The refuge hosts a deer hunt every year to "thin the herd", reduce the overpopulation, whatever you want to call it. This is, to put it mildly, controversial.

The deer I saw today would be such easy pickings for hunters that I can't see the sport in it. What challenge is there in shooting a deer that obligingly stands right in front of you for a long time in the middle of the road? It's not like they're hiding from you in the deep woods and you need to use all your arcane tracker lore to find them. They walk right up to you!

So the deer were probably the highlight of my day, especially since the whimbrels were nowhere to be found now that I had my camera at the ready. Maybe they moved on already. Plenty of lesser yellow legs were in evidence though. They were so thick around the boat ramp that I couldn't count them. Some official looking person pulled right up onto the boat ramp in an official looking truck, took out an official looking clipboard and started counting them though. They surely won't go uncounted.

There are still slews of rumpled, worn looking mockingbirds around. They seem to like the signs around the Hellcat dike area. I seem to recall that the mockingbirds winter over - they don't migrate - so I'm not sure what this massing of their numbers is about. I wasn't into counting today. In fact, I didn't even write down all the birds I saw. I did at least finish off the roll of film, so I can go back and fill in the entries that are missing photos.