Monday, June 18, 2012

Doe Protects Fawn

A couple of days ago I mentioned that we'd been unsuccessfully looking for fawns.  Well, today I have a story to tell.

Yesterday's trolley took us through a forest where we experienced something we, more than likely, will never see again.  In an open field ahead of us stood a doe, so we stopped to see if a fawn might be with her.  Hubby spotted something black moving in the background just as we noticed the fawn walking toward its momma.  Instantly the black object, which turned out to be a coyote, ran toward the fawn.  Mamma deer spun around and bounded toward the coyote and chased him like hell wouldn't have it into the forest, away from her babe.  The poor little fawn didn't know where its momma went, so it just walked into the trees.

We saw four more fawns, but unfortunately they were lying on the road, hit by motorists.  The dear little ones are dropped into a harsh and cruel world, not knowing they are easy prey to predators just waiting to rip their lives away from them.

This experience will be a conversation piece, it was that dramatic.  Sure makes one realize that love lives in the animal kingdom, just like it does in ours.

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals... 
In a world older and more complete than ours,
 they move finished and complete,
 gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained,
 living by voices we shall never hear.
  They are not brethren,
 they are not underlings;
 they are other nations,
 caught with ourselves in the net of life and time,
 fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."
~Henry Beston