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Peter Hensel
Blessed, Blessed, Blessed: To Live With Marin's Wildlife---Part III
Galaxy The Fawn's Epic Journey (Continued)--
No, it is not the best of survival strategies to be weak, helpless and unprotected in a predatory world .
The crow surely knew that as it hopped toward the spot where the day-old fawn had hidden himself in the tall grass. For the crow, this anomaly was worth investigating. Crows have very sharp eyes. They’re smart, too. They easily see and evaluate the usual and unusual in other wild creatures’ behavior patterns.
This was unusual ---for a very young fawn to be left alone, out in the open and unprotected.
The sentry crow, from his perch on the cherry plum tree, would have seen that Galaxy’s mother was standing off in a remote corner of the yard as if rigid and traumatized. The injured doe had positioned herself far far away from her vulnerable offspring as if she wanted no part of it. For the moment, her maternal protective instinct seemed to have deserted her.
Did the crow have a plan? I doubt it. But the crow was casing out vulnerabilities. Maybe the crow wanted to see if the mother deer would react if it flew down and approached her baby. Maybe the crow wanted to test the fawn to see if it was alert enough to scramble to safety.
We’ve all seen crows on the road, pecking away at road kill. They love fresh meat when they can get it.
But, seriously, how could a bird put a fawn, much larger than a crow, in jeopardy?
Answer: by crow mobbing behavior. A single crow could call in allies to flock on the target. They could peck with sharp beaks. The fawn’s eyes large eyes would be especially vulnerable. He could become blinded, immobile.
Just a day old, with the map of the yard still unformed in his head, this fawn---under attack and with still wobbly legs --- could easily become disoriented and fall down, unable to flee back to the cover of the bamboo hedge. Then he’d be doomed. To a death by pecking. He would probably die of sheer fright.
All this occurred to me in an instant, as a flash of possibilities, as I watched the crow hopping toward the senseless, sleeping fawn.
I did not think the danger. I felt it at the non-verbal level in my gut.
“Get out of there!” I yelled, clapping my hands.
I watched from my upper deck as the crow flew back up in the cherry plum tree.
But after a minute it flew down to repeat the behavior, which now seemed less like an investigation and more like stalking. Again I yelled and clapped and the crow flew back up to the same branch.
The fawn did not even raise its head. Galaxy was sleeping the sleep of the innocent, off somewhere in fawn dreamland, incognizant, apparently out like a light.
I have a powerful squirt gun about 36 inches long and with barrel about an inch and a half in diameter. It’s marketed on Amazon as “The Stream Machine”. I use it to keep cats away from my bird feeder. You fill the sink with water, stick in the muzzle---full of perforated holes—and pull back the plunger to draw water up the barrel. The Stream Machine will shoot out a solid, drenching stream of water about fifty feet. It’s great for kids’ pool war games.
Perched jauntily on his branch, the crow did not appreciate a blast from the Stream Machine. But neither did it seem especially ruffled. It merely changed locales. It flew over to the taller Flowering Eucalyptus Tree next to the bamboo hedge.
Now I had to reload. And, down in the yard, I become a stalker myself.
Taking another blast, a semi-direct hit at the end of the squirt gun’s range, the crow flew off toward the park. But I sensed it would be back. And sure enough, five minutes later, it returned, settling on a still taller branch of the eucalyptus.
This game could go on for hours. And the crow, sitting outside on its perch, could afford to be a lot more patient than me.
I went inside and called Wild Care.
No answer. All I got was the answering machine. It was a Friday and now around 5 pm.
“Sometimes if animal mothers are weak or sick or injured, they abandon their babies,” said Jackie. “I had a cat once that had four kittens. She got sick and she stopped feeding them and they all died.”
“Look,” I said, pointing from the back deck. “The mother deer is still standing over there in the corner beneath the redwood tree and she hasn’t moved an inch---even with all the clapping and yelling and squirting. And the fawn is totally out of it. It never even woke up. It can’t protect itself. God knows what will happen this time when it gets dark tonight.”
“Let’s just leave it up to the Higher Power. Whatever happens, that’s just nature’s way.”
“I can’t.”
“Well then?”
“Get a big towel. A bath towel.”
“Why?”
“We’re going to pluck the fawn from the grass, wrap it in the towel and take it up to Wild Care in San Rafael.”
“We? You are, not me…I’m not going…Anyway, Wild Care’s closed. ”
Smart Jackie. She’d already intuited that I would be driving the van and she would be sitting in the back, holding. She wanted no part of playing a squirming, abandoned fawn’s nanny.
“They’ll be somebody there,” I assured. “It’s May and Wild Care is just blitzed with folks bringing in orphaned wild animal babies---from all over Marin County. That’s why they don’t answer.”
“This is not natural.”