It was a morning not long ago, on a walk in Pettigrew State Park. The doe was part of a group with no less than two fawns in tow, although there was no indication any of the young ones were, strictly speaking, her charges.
Nevertheless, the circumstances put her in no mood to brook unplanned disruption of the group’s browsing routine. In short, this pretty girl — as dainty and fetching as she might outwardly appear — wasn’t about to yield the path to me if she could help it. This is something I love about deer.
For starters, one has to admire their unrivaled skill distinguishing the unfamiliar and out-of-place in a sprawling wall of trunks and undergrowth. Hunters often laud the turkey as a master of threat detection, their unbroken cloaks of camouflage donned in deference to the bird’s keen perception. But in my experience — and I’ve crossed paths with both deer and turkey many times — the turkey’s gift is nearsighted by comparison to the deer’s.
Even at distances far exceeding one-hundred yards, a whitetail will perceive irregular objects in the woods when no movements would clue it otherwise. This is, in fact, the most plausible explanation for why deer, when suspicious of the unknown, try to provoke unidentified objects into moving, for the very purpose of confirming or allaying their suspicions. Such skill requires uncanny vision, but so much more; it demands a precise knowledge of the landscape, and the shapes, patterns, and colors that do and do not jibe with it.
It was those perceptual resources that lay behind my lovely “opponent’s” behavior. Click on the image, and at full-size you’ll observe her left foreleg poised for a defiant stomp. Combined with a snort, it’s a whitetail’s proud but harmless attempt at intimidation, the only weapon in its arsenal to provoke revealing movement. The gesture only serves to make these wild beauties all the more winsome, in my opinion.
I’ve often thought, if I were going to date a forest animal, the doe would be my choice. It’s encounters like this that incline me toward that charmed, if eccentric, declaration.
