Daily News-Record, June 9, 2023
At this time of year, you might literally almost step on a baby white-tailed deer. One morning I walked over to my daylily garden to see how it was doing. I stopped at the edge and looked towards the back of the garden before looking at the plants right at my feet. When I did look down, I was shocked to see a baby deer looking up at me! Apparently, it felt well hidden among the tall leaves of the daylily plants, and it was. I never would have seen it if I hadn’t gone over there.
A baby deer is called a fawn while wearing its white-spotted, reddish brown “baby coat” and is unweaned; still suckling its mother’s milk. Fawns are born at the end of May and the early part of June in Virginia.
An adult female deer, called a doe, may give birth to one, two, or three young. Very rarely, four fawns may be born. The number depends upon the mother’s age and physical condition. Usually, a single baby comprises her first birth. In subsequent years, she normally will have twins and sometimes triplets. However, females with an inadequate food supply and in poorer health will have fewer babies than deer in top form.
Fawns can walk soon after birth but they don’t go very far for several weeks. Therefore, if you find a baby deer in your yard, as I did, you can figure that your yard or someplace quite close by served as the maternity ward!
A 1972 study done in Texas found that, on average, white-tailed deer fawns were only active 8% of the time during their first two weeks of life. By the time they reached one month of age, male fawns were active about 16% of the time and females were active about 12% of the time.
Each period of daytime activity tended to last less than 35 minutes, increasing from two periods a day during the first week to five or six periods a day by the age of one month. The duration of the activity periods increased with the increasing age of the fawns, but they weren’t active for two hours at a time until they were more than one month old. Only during their first week of life were the young deer most active during midday hours. After that, they moved around in the morning and evening hours.
People often happen upon a fawn during the day and assume it’s abandoned. They take it home to try to care for it, or they take it to a wildlife rehabilitator. But please resist the urge to “save” one of these cute creatures.
Mothers associate with their fawns very little during the first 8 weeks after giving birth so as not to attract predators to a helpless baby. So, if a fawn looks healthy and isn’t crying as if it’s starving, it’s undoubtedly being cared for, and will fare much better with its mom than with humans.
Marlene A. Condon is the author/photographer of The Nature-friendly Garden: Creating a Backyard Haven for Plants, Wildlife, and People (Stackpole Books; information at www.marlenecondon.com). You can read her blog at https://InDefenseofNature.blogspot.com