Deer dilemma
The landscape out the side doors changed this week.
Standing there, sipping my morning coffee, I saw something that looked strangely out of place. Four deer were grazing in the yard.
That’s nothing new. A herd of eight of them live on my property, wandering to where the edible stuff takes them each day. What I saw that morning was different: the deer were inside the fenced yard.
My first thoughts were not They jumped the fence, but rather, Someone let them in. I could see that the gate was closed, and there were no breaches in the fence. They’d jumped in, probably inspired by the greening grass. I opened the door and yelled something or other. Three of the four lifted their heads and stared at me. The fourth kept on eating.
This felt like a familiar crisis; I’d been through it before, in a different home in a less-wooded neighborhood. One evening when my kids were grade-school age, a deer jumped the fence into our backyard and, apparently panicked, began storming around, snorting and grunting. Struck by maternal fear that the deer would storm the barricades and come into the house, I sent the kids upstairs and called the police.
Two officers came and, with a skill that suggested they’d escorted a few trapped deer in their time, gently cajoled the deer to the back of the yard, where the animal made a run for it and jumped the fence, thus becoming our neighbor’s problem.
This week, I had four deer to extract from the yard. Not wanting to call the police, I called my neighbor.
“Oh, dear,” she said, well aware of the pun.
“Should I go around the side of the house and open the gate from outside the fence,” I said, “or do you think they will charge at me?”
“Better open the gate and run,” she said. After a bit more discussion we decided, given the time of year, one or more of those deer might be pregnant and irritable, and I shouldn’t get too close. I thought about sending Smoothie out to do the job, but he’d be way outnumbered. And so I shouted at them like a grumpy old neighbor man.
Three of them complied, and cleared the fence like Olympic hurdlers. The fourth one froze in place.
“Get,” I shouted. The deer (he? she?) walked toward the fence, backed up and then went back to grazing. Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, its three buddies stood watching, as if to say, “Come on, you can do this.”
Deer number four ran toward them, then stopped short.
“You jumped it to get in here,” I said, “you know how to get back out.”
I directed the deer to the other side of the yard, where the fence is at least a foot lower. With big sweeping motions, I pointed over there. The deer looked at me, turned toward his friends and, with five graceful steps, leapt toward them. He’d escaped.
“Deer are kinda dumb,” my son texted when I sent him a photo, but I might be the dumb one. I thought of that bit of drama as a one-time thing, never to happen again. But the deer have discovered food inside the fence, and they know how to get it. And even the dumb one is learning how to get back out.
Chances are they’ve been jumping the fence all along and I’ve never caught them doing it. There’s really no keeping them out.
They’re part of the landscape.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.