Adele

Posts tagged with "deer"

Two of a Triplet

Sunday, 7. October 2007, 18:23:30

I did not choose to get up at 6am this morning but Kelly and Leila did their wakeup call worst, insisting that they urgently required their breakfasts. This turned to be a blessing in disguise for when I glanced out at the wide eastern horizon, I saw a scene that sent me scrambling for the camera!

Luna and Venus, the two brightest lights of the night sky, side by side waiting for the dawn.

Apparent brightness of stars and planets is measured in terms of "magnitude". Very simply, the lower anything is on the scale, the brighter it appears to us. According to Stellarium, Venus is currently -4.38, and the crescent moon shines at about -8. (A full moon is about -13, and is brighter than anything in our sky except the Sun and some extreme, very rare supernovas.) Humans can see down to about +6 with the naked eye, although you'd need very good, dark skies to do so. Given the better light-gathering properties of cats and foxes, I wonder if they see more stars than we do when they look upwards?

But I was so preoccupied with these two...

...that it didn't occur to me to look for anything else! When I looked on Stellarium's chart, I noticed that Saturn was right in there amongst them too! I would have liked to have got a shot of all three - bother

__

Two other brief points of note: this evening I saw two roe deer in seperate fields. One had the heavy grey look of a winter coat, but the other still appeared quite brown. I guess she will moult soon though.

I've also added several new species of fungi to the collection

26 comments

Land of Waterfalls

Wednesday, 15. August 2007, 22:20:14

wilderness, strathcona, deer, cougar ...

Yesterday was a break from the coastline. I visited Strathcona Provincial Park, one of BC's oldest and most famous chunks of protected wilderness. It began with the beautiful and ended up with the faintly ethereal

- strange sightings I certainly have, but old memories of leopards and lynx after dark make me wonder what exactly did cross the road ahead of the car late last night.

However, there is nothing ambiguous about mountains or lakes.

Strathcona has old forest stands with Douglas firs that seem to touch the sky

Although rainfall is rather less in the interior of the island, there is still plenty of water to generate some spectacular falls. They are mystically picturesque as they cascade between rock and forest, although the sudden contrasts between light and dark make photographing them rather challenging

These are the Lupin Falls...

...Lady Falls...

...Myra Falls. This one descends over three big steps almost right into Buttle Lake.

Most of Strathcona is off limits to hunting, and watching deer is rather simpler than it is out in the rural districts. As the afternoon drew onwards, this inquisitive hind began to graze.

***

Night fell.

Roadsides in British Columbia are littered with posts and road information signs, reflective front and back. Some are for drivers. Others are there to flash back when lit by headlights and warn roadside wildlife of an approaching car. It's a nice idea that frankly does not work. But it becomes a mesmorising ritual when driving after dark...flash...see the post...flash...see the post...

We rounded a corner. Another flash, white light, blue shadow, bright but cold light - I have seen that before, so clearly, twice in mainland BC and once in Africa, when glimpsing big cats after dark. But this time I thought nothing of it. Another post, surely.

We continued up the slope and completed the bend.

There was no post. There was nothing there.

Just the grass verge, adjacent to the forest, empty and quiet.

So...

Was it a cougar?

On balance, I have to say that is improbable, though not impossible. Cougar eyeshine is said to typically be greenish-gold, although even with domestic cats and foxes in England, I more readily distinguish between them not by their eyeshine colour but by their movement. The reflection in this case was so bright as to immediately rule out almost anything else, and yet...

I don't know. Twelve years worth of looking for cats, occasionally seeing cats, tracking cats, does not help me answer the question. It will remain a mystery.

Cats keep their secrets

24 comments

Re-Rescuing!

Saturday, 4. August 2007, 04:29:14

emergency, deer

So how I should I start the telling of this epic?

Perhaps a chronology would help. I don't have many pictures of this but I do have lots of movie footage, which you'll find at the end of this long post!

30th July

A female deer hid a fawn, perhaps only five days old, close to a road while she went into the forest to feed. This is how deer survive; the fawns are odourless and stay perfectly still and quiet. Caribou give birth in the predator-free alpine zone; elk kick anything that approaches their young, but deer hide their fawns. It works; or at least, it's worked for countless millennia.

Perhaps the hind returned an hour later, expecting to feed her offspring again. But the fawn was gone.

A local man (who shall be anonymous) had picked up the fawn. He took it back to his home and children.

31st July

For two days the fawn was fed cow's milk, which is extremely unhealthy for most young mammals. It may have had some of its mother's milk still in its stomach, which would have helped to neutralise the cow's milk for a while. Had it continued on this diet, it would have ended up with diarrhea, dehydration and ultimately death.

1st August

The fawn was offered to someone else in the village, who alerted me to what had been happening.

Cue a series of panicked phonecalls and emails to Ontario (well, I hadn't a clue who to contact in BC). Ontario is three hours ahead of BC and yet, despite the late hour, the folks there still took the time to offer all possible help. Donna and Sandra - thankyou so much. I'd have been completely lost without you!

7:30pm.

Even after three days, there might have been a chance that the mother was still looking for her fawn. The fawn was lying alone in the living room of the house, with the TV on full volume close by I was shocked at how small it was - it was barely bigger than a cat. It's very late in the year for deer to be giving birth, though this one seemed even smaller than the newborn I saw in Alberta in June.

With the consent of the family, we got the deer out of the house and into a dog kennel.

For the next three hours we searched for the mother. Hope shone brightly when we saw a hind fairly close to where the fawn had been found. We got the fawn out of the car and the hind stared at it. Unfortunately, at that point the fawn rushed down the bank into the undergrowth. I stayed on the road - but then the hind came running towards me! Could this be it?

Alas, no

The hind went into the forest. We took the fawn to where she disappeared and even though it bleated loudly, the hind did not return.

She could have been the mother; certainly her behaviour was odd. However, she might have just been an unrelated deer curious at the fawn, or wondering if this escapee was her own offspring.

10:30pm

We staggered back into the village. I was desperately ill with a migraine I can hardly articulate what it was like, staring into the darkness and car headlights with this tiny deer on my lap while fighting a strong feeling that I was about to pass out with pain I was also bothered that we had no suitable food for the fawn at all. Cow's milk is as good as poison; goat's milk is fine, but you cannot find that in remote coastal villages. The fawn spent the night in the other person's house.

2nd August

I tried to find some lactobacillus tablets, which can be put in cow's milk to make it more suitable for fawns. But I might as well have searched for commercial deer milk. The supplies here are very basic; sometimes I cannot even find mushrooms for sale, let alone anything more unusual The other suggestion was mixing milk with yoghurt, which also contains these bacteria, albeit in lesser numbers. But the fawn only drank a very little

Obviously a decision had to be made quickly about its future. Ideally, it would go back with its mother, but after the previous night's adventures the reality of trying to reunite deer in dense rainforest made hope faint. The alternative was to put it with an official wildlife rehab facility...

Yes, well, I'm three hours away from the nearest town, three and a half from where the relevant group is based (although they themselves act as transport to a deer specialist even further south). I don't have a car, the driver who had accompanied me on the attempt to find the hind was now unavailable and there's no public transport. I spent nearly all of yesterday on the phone trying to sort this out

Eventually we figured out a way to get to the town on Friday morning. Then I had another phone call: the lady from the rehab centre very kindly offered to put herself through a four hour return trip, if I could get the deer to the forest village halfway between my village and the town!

Fortunately I was able to get a lift. A three hour return trip for me

The fawn is now in safe hands

Direct Link

It is a good outcome, given the circumstances. But I also retain some regrets. The mother has needlessly lost her baby. This should simply never have happened. A deer fawn lying down alone is almost certainly not orphaned. Unless the hind is definitely known to have been killed (hit by a car, etc) the fawn should not be removed. If anyone reading this does have some concern about a local deer, the best thing to do is to talk about it with a wildlife rescue charity.

14 comments

The Re-rescued: Teaser post

Friday, 3. August 2007, 05:00:16

deer, emergency

All wild animals have strategies to keep their offspring as safe as possible. For mule deer, it's a question of the little fawns bedding down somewhere quiet and hidden while the mother goes to graze. Which is great...except when Homo sapiens gets involved...

Oh boy. Where to begin

You don't expect to find deer in a house!

The last 24 hours have been sheer and utter stress; but I have a story to tell: of what happens when fawns are wrongly taken from the wild, and the mind-boggling exhaustion of trying to undo the damage. Poor fawn; it has no idea of the problems it caused me!

Maybe I should wait until tomorrow

15 comments

Now You See Me

Friday, 13. July 2007, 01:16:29

deer

I spend so much time trying to see animals. Sometimes I step back and consider how the world looks from the animal's point of view.

(HungryGhost's idea kind of helped, too

)

This morning I saw a blacktail buck in the estuary grasses, standing motionless in the tallgrass prairie-like landscape.

What does a human see?

What would a wolf see?

As far as we can tell, a scene very different from the one above. Dogs, at least, have been studied for this quite extensively.

- they have less colour vision; red and green are poor
- they have less acuity; they cannot see as much detail. Life is more of a blur!
- they are, in effect, near-sighted.
- they have greater sensitivity to light, which is why they can see better at night
- they have greater ability to detect motion. This is why Kelly and Chiara often beat me at spotting moving wildlife, and why I beat them at seeing stationary animals.

There's a fascinating article about all this here.

For some time now I've been wondering if I could doctor a picture and re-create a wolf's eye view. Of course, to be precise, it would also need to be about a metre above the ground rather than my height, but perhaps the wolf was standing on a fallen tree or something

This is only a first attempt and probably could be greatly improved (any suggestions, please let me know) but it's given me some food for thought anyway.

This picture looks grey because it is mostly green. A blue sky in the wolf's world would still look blue, perhaps a little paler though.

The flip question - what does the deer see?

Avoiding predators is partly done through vision. Elk in Yellowstone, for example, started to avoid willow copses after the reintroduction of wolves apparently due to poor visibility. (Incidentally, this led to the famous "ecology of fear" studies that showed how elk avoiding wolves led to a ripple effect throughout the ecosystem, benefiting many smaller creatures.)

Deer have a greater field of view than humans as their eyes are positioned at a different angle. It seems they have much better colour vision than wolves (okay, this is a study on whitetails, but you can't have everything

)

Seeing predators in advance of an attack might actually be more valuable with cougars, however, which have a strong tendency to attack from the rear. Cats are thought to have poorer colour vision than canids, but better night vision.