Saturday, August 16, 2008

The year of the deer

This evening, while we were picking up some pizza in the Jersey suburbs, my mother-in-law and I saw a pair of fawns at the edge of the treeline. This marks the fourth time in a month that I've seen baby McFawnersons - and only the fifth time in my life that I can recall seeing fawns in the wild.

One of the fawns had blue eyes. Is this a rare thing? I can't say that I've ever seen pictures of a deer with blue eyes, let alone one in real life.

Does anyone out there know - have the deer been particularly prolific this year? Or have I just failed to observe the fawns all around me?

3 comments:

Jenny said...

I don't know about up there, but down here the Department of Game and Fish no longer lets anyone just go get a license to hunt, you have to apply months ahead of time then they do a drawing and if you are lucky, you won a permit. This has cut down on the number of (legal) hunters, and the deer are breeding like mad (hmm, they aren't allowed to hunt does anyway, kinda blows my theory).

Anyway, that's my theory. We have seen more deer than usual around here the past couple of years, and number of deer vs. vehicle wrecks have increased as well. Any evening we can go to my FIL's circle on his ranch and count at least 40 head on his wheat stubble.

Patti said...

I've seen more. And more of them are active during daylight hours.

Anonymous said...

Are you including in your sitings the fawns we had grazing between the upper raceways and the parking lot at Balsam Creek. I am sure you saw those on more than one occasion that summer!