The Fawn

I stayed home from work today to be here for my daughter who is still recovering from her tonsillectomy. I haven't had to wake up in the middle of the night to check on a child in years but even though she is 25, she is my baby and when they tell you to check on them during the night you do it. I think she is doing fine, I just needed to refresh myself. But anyway, this is St. Francis who stands in front of our pool about 50 feet or more from the back of the house and slightly uphill. At about 1:00 p.m. today I happened to be looking out the window and noticed that there was something brown to the right of St. Francis that was moving. Of course, it's not moving in this picture, but I still think that you can see it.

I grabbed the binoculars that I keep on the kitchen counter (doesn't everyone????) and could make out the form of, well I know you can guess by the title of the post - it was a fawn. So I carefully tiptoed outside with my camera, not sure how close I was going to get and not wanting to spook it.

But as you can see, I was able to get pretty close (I did use the zoom but it allowed me to get up to about 5 feet away). It's beautiful and was so calm. I did say hello (doesn't everyone talk to animal visitors????) and told it how pretty it was and not to be scared and snickered out loud that it was going to love our yard just like all the deer do!!

I kept checking every once and a while to see if it was still there and whether the mother was around anywhere. There were a couple of deer who came down into the yard around 3, but they didn't seem to notice the baby.


When my husband came home, I discouraged him from working near the fawn (he wasn't too happy about that because he is in the process of taking down our old pool which is right behind this area). It was still there as night fell and needless to say, I was quite worried that we were going to find it still there in the morning but dead as it hadn't obviously eaten anything since I first saw it earlier in the day.

Then about 9:30 this evening, I turned out the lights inside the house and turned the outside light on and, oh how I wish I could have taken a picture of the scene that I saw in the dusk. The mother and the baby were standing in front of our birdbath which is about 20 feet to the left of where the baby was lying and she was licking it as it was nursing and nuzzling her neck. I could just barely make all this out through the binoculars. Then they slowly walked away, the mom leading the baby into the darkness. I am so glad that she came back.