The Hidden Life of Deer

by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

  By a splendid coincidence, my impression was soon confirmed with the help of my wonderful friend Sy Montgomery. Sy called one day to say that her neighbor, Hunt Dowse, had witnessed a doe giving birth early that morning in his field. I immediately phoned him for the story, and he told me that he had looked out his window at about five o’clock to see a doe lying in the field with a tiny wet fawn lying near her hindquarters. Evidently she was still in labor, delivering a second fawn. With her, almost frisking at the sight of the first fawn, was her grown daughter, and also a smaller daughter, a yearling. There they were with their mom, keeping her company in her hour of need, welcoming the new arrivals.

  What to make of all this information? I’m not sure, of course, but it does seem possible that a deer in her first pregnancy might of necessity give birth alone, while a deer with daughters might do so in their company. The daughters seem to stay with their mothers for as long as they can, because “follow your mother” seems to be deer policy. But it doesn’t appear to work the other way, or not strongly—there is no special rule saying “follow your daughter.”

  Even so, there is more to this question. When I told these stories to other friends, Ilisa Barbash and Castle McLaughlin, I was rewarded with a slightly different story that shows, I think, the nature of the mother-daughter relationship. Castle was doing research on wild mustangs in the Dakotas, and learned that on a nearby ranch when the rancher was away, a heifer began to give birth with great difficulty. (A heifer, of course, is a cow that has never had a calf. Thus, for the heifer in question, the birth was her first.) The rancher’s wife did not know how to help the heifer and was waiting for her husband’s return. Hour after hour, the heifer cried and moaned, unable to deliver. Then a cow appeared in the distance, coming in her direction. As she came, she had to force her way through three strong barbed wire fences, but at last she reached the heifer’s side. Who was she? The rancher’s wife didn’t know, but late that night when her husband returned, he identified her as the heifer’s mother. She had been pastured three miles away.

  How did she know of her daughter’s difficulty? That’s a mystery. Perhaps cattle, like several other ungulates, have an infrasonic component in their calls. Since 1983 when Katy Payne discovered infrasound in elephants, it has been found in the calls of several different kinds of animals, but I’m not sure that anyone has bothered to look for it in cattle. Infrasound has very long waves, and travels far. We humans can’t hear it, although the waves travel right through us. The word “sound” refers to what we can hear, hence we have named these waves “below sound.” That’s true for us, and since we consider ourselves to be the only creatures of importance—if people can’t hear it, it isn’t true sound—we named it accordingly. But it is certainly true sound for those who make it. They can hear it. And even without an infrasonic component, the voices of cattle travel very far, if conditions are favorable. Years ago when our farm was active, we sometimes heard the voice of a bull on a farm at least two miles away through thick woods. Perhaps despite the distance the cow heard her daughter.

  What did the cow think she could accomplish with her journey? Obviously she knew about childbirth—she had birthed the heifer. Perhaps she couldn’t help with the delivery, but she recognized her daughter’s voice, knew she was in trouble, and could protect her daughter from attack, as few things could be more tempting to a predator than a helpless female in childbirth, bleeding and crying.

  To me, these stories raise some interesting questions. True, childbirth is exceptionally painful—it is said to be the ultimate pain, the most anyone can feel. Worse things can happen, to be sure, but you can’t feel more pain because your nervous system doesn’t transmit it. Our nervous systems do not differ significantly from those of other mammals, so this is surely true of other animals as well, especially those who, like ourselves, deliver fairly large babies. But not everyone in childbirth makes loud calls. For some unknown reason I didn’t scream or moan when I was in labor, and neither did my female in-laws whose birthings I attended, even though, in one case, the woman in the next delivery room was screaming her head off. We ground our teeth and growled, but we didn’t make loud vocalizations. Perhaps this was instinctive. When in pain, most animals—certainly wild animals—are dead silent, no matter how much discomfort they may be experiencing. The last thing they want is to draw attention to themselves when they are seriously compromised.

  And what is the purpose of a loud call if not to draw attention? An animal caught by a predator often screams. Why? Because another predator may hear it, and come to see what is going on. People who hunt coyotes, for instance, use a call that sounds like a rabbit screaming. A rabbit would never scream for any reason other than that a predator grabbed it. The coyote thinks that perhaps a meal is in the offing, and visits the scene. Thus the rabbit-call technique merely takes advantage of what happens in nature. If, with luck, the second predator is more formidable than the first, or if he tussles with the first to get the victim, the first may drop the victim, who then has a chance to escape while the two predators are involved with each other. This happens, not all that often, but often enough to make a scream worth trying.

  Where certain animals might shriek, the ungulate families make loud, shuddering calls. So perhaps the deer in labor who vocalize loudly are seeking help—not consciously, probably, but in the general, evolutionary scheme of things. This would parallel our kind of screaming. We rarely plan to scream. Instead, we usually find ourselves screaming as does the rabbit caught by a fox. In other circumstances a doe would probably do what all wild animals in pain normally do, which is to keep silent. Yet sometimes a doe in labor calls out. She is in extremis, and Gaia tells her she needs help, so she takes a chance that her mother or perhaps her daughter will hear her before a predator does. Perhaps that’s what Dr. Rue’s primapara doe was doing. Evidently that’s what the heifer did, and in her case, it worked.

  A few days later I saw the Delta mother and her two daughters in the field near the pond. The doe was no longer pregnant. Rather, she was standing with her head up and her thigh loose, beneath which something was moving. It was her little fawn, nursing. Her daughters stood nearby. A few hours earlier, I had discouraged someone from driving a truck to the pond, and was glad I had done so—the fawn was standing just where the truck would have gone, but if the truck had passed there, the fawn would have been hiding. Newborn fawns are so small that they hide under ferns and other low-growing plants, and the driver wouldn’t have seen him.

  When the fawn finished nursing, he frisked for a moment, and his mother and one of his sisters put their noses down near him. Then they started for the woods with the fawn behind them. They passed through grass up to their shoulders, or long enough to completely hide the fawn, and when they emerged the fawn was no longer following. The grown deer went casually into the woods. The fawn had stopped somewhere along the way to curl up under a fern or in a tuft of grass where he would wait until the others came back for him. They may have done this later, but I didn’t see them.

  Chapter Six

  Fawns

  The fawns of the deer family are amazing animals. Just minutes after a fawn is born he is able to nurse, which he does for a bit, crawling up to his mother, then tries to stand on wobbly legs, and soon is able to follow his mother as do the young of the horse and cow families. The mother will lead him away from the birth area for safety, even though she will have licked up all the blood and eaten the placenta and any plants that had birth matter on them—even plants that deer don’t normally eat. Still, no matter how clean the birthplace may be, it’s better to find a new place, so she leads, and the fawn follows. But then, instead of continuing on as one of the antelopes might do, she stops and somehow persuades the fawn to hide. The fawn creeps under a low-growing plant, curls into a ball that would fit on a salad plate, and stays there. The mother leaves. If she has twins she will lead the other to a different place, as she does not wa
nt them together—the separation is insurance against predators. Once in a while a well-meaning person will find a hidden fawn and take him home to feed him cow’s milk from a baby bottle, assuming he has been abandoned. Almost certainly, he has not been abandoned, and this is a terrible thing to do, as a person cannot raise a fawn properly, nor is cow’s milk good for him. In the unlikely event that he was orphaned, it’s possible that another deer will adopt him, as perhaps was the case with the Betas.

  But mostly, nobody sees the fawn, no person and no animal. He is the color of the earth, spotted to look like dappled light, hiding in a dappled shadow where he has no outline, and he doesn’t move. He also has no odor, as his mother has licked him perfectly clean, nor does he urinate or defecate until his mother returns and stimulates him to do so. She ingests his urine and his feces—a common practice for many animals who have helpless or partly helpless young—and carries them away. Thus, even if the fawn changes place, no odor remains to suggest his existence. The only way a fawn could be more difficult to notice would be if he wasn’t there at all.

  When a fawn is hiding, no matter how young, he takes responsibility for his own protection and keeps his head up, alert to what is going on around him. If anything comes near, or even if a plane flies over, he curls up tight with his head down and his ears flat, but he keeps his eyes open. If the disturbance gets worse, he enters a state that can almost be called suspended animation. Dr. Rue cites an amazing study by Nadine Jacobsen of Cornell who investigated the physiology of fawns, measuring their heartbeats and respiration as they hid.[1] Jacobsen arranged five phases of disturbance, the first phase being no disturbance. The fawn rested with his head up and his ears forward. His average heart rate was 177 beats per minute, during which time he took twenty-one breaths. In phase two, an observer approached him. He instantly flattened himself, stopped breathing, and his heart rate fell from 177 to 60 beats per minute. In phase three, while the observer sat quietly nearby, the fawn’s heart rate crept back up and he began to breathe normally. In phase four, the observer moved about. Again the fawn stopped breathing and his heart rate dropped. In phase five, the observer left the fawn alone. His heart rate rose to 183 beats per minute and he took thirty breaths, almost panting, trying to regain the oxygen the experience had cost him.

  This is why hiding fawns are not found often. But they don’t hide all the time. They get up and change places, and may do this several times a day. As has been said, a doe often hides a fawn in our field, and one year I noticed a fawn running right and left, bucking, shaking, and running again. In the field there are ground-nesting hornets, and I believe he had disturbed some of them. When his mother came into the field to nurse him, he wasn’t where she had left him. She didn’t seem at all frantic—it was as if she expected him to move. She poked around here and there and finally noticed him scrunched up in a grassy place, about fifty feet from where he was before. She nursed and cleaned him and both of them seemed calm, as if things were as they should be.

  In 1998, however, a fawn in the field was killed by a dog. The dog, a black Lab, belonged to a friend. We happened to be outside standing on the lawn with our dogs. Suddenly the Lab noticed something in the field. He must have known what it was—he took off running with my dogs after him, and his owner couldn’t call him back. When he grabbed the fawn and we saw what he was doing, I ran too. He ran ahead of me with the fawn bleating and struggling in his mouth. I ran as fast as I could, yelling at him, hoping he would drop the fawn and I could save it, but he ran into the woods and up a hill and by then was out of sight and so far ahead that chasing him was useless. I went home and he showed up about half an hour later as if nothing had happened. A neighbor then phoned to say that she had seen a large black dog carrying a dead fawn. She asked if it was my dog, and I told her it wasn’t. She assumed that he had found the fawn already dead and had simply picked it up, and I didn’t enlighten her. What he did with the fawn we’ll never know. Perhaps the neighbor caused him to drop it. Strangely, no doe came into the field to search for the fawn, at least not in the daytime. Perhaps she was nearby when the event took place and knew what happened.

  Another fawn was killed a few years later, probably by something larger than a dog. Half a mile from my house I found the severed head of a young fawn in the road. I examined it carefully and was amazed to see that the cut was as clean as the cut of a knife, not chewed upon, just sliced, so I assumed that the killer was big with large, sharp side teeth, whether molars or premolars—the teeth with which the carnivores cut their meat. I had no reason to think that the fawn had been hidden near us, and I saw no doe searching for him. If she did, it wasn’t in the daytime, so the whole event may have happened far away, or else this doe too knew what had happened.

  Sometimes the fate of a fawn is not clear to the doe. One of the saddest things I ever saw was a doe in our field early one morning, searching, searching. Obviously she was looking for a fawn who had been there on her last visit but, it seemed, was there no more. Perhaps a predator had killed it during the night. After a while the doe abandoned all caution and seemed not to notice or not to care that I was watching as she anxiously looked here, looked there, went back and looked again, tried another part of the field, and another, and another, so distressed, so anxious, that my heart ached for her. She finally gave up and went into the woods. But she couldn’t believe that her fawn wasn’t somewhere, and in an hour or so she reappeared to search all the places she had searched before, as if she might have overlooked something. I saw her again in the afternoon, and again the next day. Perhaps she was telling herself stories of where the fawn might be and how she would find him. In time, her hope faded and she didn’t return.

  I remembered her in connection with the Deltas. When the fawn followed his family into the long grass but did not emerge, I felt sure he was hiding there. But at that time, strange things began to happen. I saw the Deltas the next day, but not the fawn, and at no time did the mother seem to be looking for him or nursing him. This went on for several days. The mother and her daughters would come into the field, but the fawn never showed himself, and the mother never seemed to be nursing. Something seemed to be wrong.

  Then I began to notice that the smaller daughter, the graceful young doe with the pointed face, was staying about a hundred yards away from her mother and sister. If she came nearer, they stared at her. She seemed unwelcome. She felt unwelcome and would stand still and look at them, with her tail pressed, her hips almost tucked, her head up, and her ears forward—the very picture of someone who wants something—but she would not approach them. When the mother and older daughter went into the woods, the younger daughter followed, but cautiously, and far behind them. This went on for several days. Then one day, the smaller daughter came tearing past my office window. I could almost have touched her. She seemed extremely agitated, and stopped to look around the field, her ears far forward and her neck stretched. Then she ran to the place where the fawn had been when I first noticed him. She looked around there for a moment, still very agitated, then ran to the edge of the woods, stopped, and looked in among the trees, then spun around and went bounding eagerly into the woods at the place where the Deltas usually entered, at the deer trail beside the swamp. For many reasons, I felt sure she wasn’t looking for the fawn—it wasn’t her fawn and she hadn’t been pregnant, nor did she have the demeanor of a doe looking for a fawn. She was searching more widely, running here and there rather than stopping and searching, looking far off into the woods rather than looking in the grass. I felt sure she was looking for her mother and sister, but how did she come to be so far from them, and why had they abandoned her so completely? They certainly had seemed to want to separate from her, but why?

  I worried about her. I also worried about the fawn, who had not been seen since the day he dropped behind his family in the long grass. Now and then I’d see the Deltas in the field again, but just the mother and the larger daughter. They seemed to have gotten
rid of the smaller daughter. Here again, the mother never once seemed to be nursing a fawn, nor did she look for him. I came to the very sad conclusion that he had disappeared, perhaps weeks earlier. The long grass was very near the swamp and the woods, both places that would shelter predators, as was the place where I first saw him.

  It seemed as if the mother had willfully cast away her younger daughter as well. Deer live as social animals, yet their rules sometimes demand antisocial results. But what rule might the daughter have broken? Perhaps, like the daughter of the deer in the woods so long ago, she had imagined that her mother’s milk was meant for her. Perhaps she kept trying to nurse, and if so, the mother would have had to chase her off. The fawn, if he was living, would need all his mother’s milk if he were to survive in winter.

  Needless to say, fawns become more vulnerable to predators when they start following their mothers, as the Delta fawn had been doing, however briefly, and which any fawn may do as early as midsummer. In our area fawns are preyed upon by black bears, coyotes, and even bobcats, who have little luck with adult deer. Small fawns are preyed upon by animals such as foxes and eagles and perhaps even fishers, none of whom have the slightest hope of catching an adult deer. But ironically, another of their dangerous predators are dogs. Witness the visiting Labrador retriever. There are always dogs and people don’t always contain them, yet if anything captured the Delta fawn, it wasn’t a dog, because that year no dogs but ours came anywhere near, and our dogs did not voyage on their own and did not go hunting.