the Walnut Diary

Sunday afternoon Bet called me to the back of the house:  “Something is making a distress call out there!  I don’t know if it is a bird or a cat up a tree, but something is in trouble.  It’s making kind of a bleating noise.”  She wandered down the stairs into the orchard.  “Look!  There it is!” she whispered.  Bet pointed at a two-week old fawn, standing lost and bewildered on the edge of the lawn.  I tried to calm her down and get her to come back into the house before she frightened the thing out of its wits, but she kept babbling away, all the way up the stairs and into the kitchen.

Our son Charlie had heard the commotion and made his own way to the orchard.  He stood there, stock still. Apparently pleased by the company of these strange animals, the fawn began gamboling about the orchard, trying out the unfamiliar, closely-cropped turf.  Suddenly he noticed this tall animal with strange hair, and so he bopped over for a visit.  Then came that great E.T. moment: the fawn, legs braced like a little, spotted saw horse, nose stretching, stretching out to the man’s fingertip.  The merest touch, a flip of the tail and E.T. was gone.  Well, not really; he went for another lap of the orchard, then posed for a photo and gradually faded into the vegetation along a fence row.  At least he was quiet after meeting Charlie.

E.T. seemed in excellent physical condition, so we were pretty sure he wasn’t the fawn orphaned by the accident on Hwy 15 this week which left a doe dead.  I had looked at the carcass, if only to make sure it wasn’t Daphne, the featured character in last week’s column in this space.  This doe was twice the size of the winsome yearling.  In fact, I suspected that the victim might have been Daphne’s mother, but the good condition of this fawn and my increasingly ragged walnut trees suggest that that very large doe is alive and well and living in the shadow of our barn.

Daphne, on the other hand, has given up ownership of the back field.  This might have something to do with the new player, a coyote who has just arrived.  I haven’t met the critter yet, but the signs are all there.  To my great relief, nothing is eating the walnut seedlings in the back field now.

But Daphne’s mom may have moved her fawn into the tall orchard grass just below the house to hide from the new predator.  The trouble with that stuff is that it’s easy to get disoriented in 7’ high growth, and maybe E.T. got away. Or perhaps there’s a second fawn.

The point of telling about all of this confusion Sunday afternoon is to underline a basic principle of environmental management:  in theory, many things sound wonderful which don’t taste so good in practice.  Take, for instance, the idea of coyotes keeping down the deer population to the betterment of the herd and the ecosystem. That sounds really good on paper, and the picture of a coyote eating a couple of dozen mice causes no one alarm.  But the local coyote-popularity poll took some wild swings today while E.T. tore around our orchard looking for a playmate.

Why do the blasted things have to be so cute?  Or why do they have to act so vulnerable and foist their family dramas off on the humans in the neighbourhood?  Deer have a genius for doing that, all the while munching their way through prized shrubs and orchard growth.

Indian Lake Marina owner Wayne Wilson still chuckles about the doe and two fawns who spent opening day of deer season on his back patio one year.  And of course you can’t drive through Chaffey’s Locks without a few eye-to-eye encounters with local whitetails.

Take the family of three deer which stroll at will around the lawns of Newboro at the moment.  They must have learned urban living from Canada geese.

So the rest of the day was an uproar of worry.  If it wasn’t bad enough for Daphne’s Mom to foist off her half-grown and quarrelsome adolescent on me, now she has to make us kid-sit the little one?

This week I bought my deer license, and hope I win a doe tag in the draw.  I won’t pick on the little ones, but if Daphne’s Mom or her current swain show their ears around here, there’ll be cutlets-a-frying, come November.  That’ll teach her to dump her family problems on the neighbours.