Spotted Again

You might remember the last fawn sighting I posted about… Since then, I’ve had several opportunities to see them around my place, but often when my camera was not at hand.

A few days ago, while driving home, we saw a mother and her youngster on the side of the road and stopped to let them cross. I was so engrossed in watching that I didn’t think to try and take a few photos until they were almost out-of-view. I love the backdrop of field and trees, but the fawn itself is little more than a brown pair of ears visible above the grass line….

Today, I headed out for a very brief walk as the sun was setting. It was unpleasantly warm and I was immediately distracted by the unwanted attention of various “bitey flies”. (Yup, that’s my highly scientific term for any number of fly species that make their living extracting blood from the local mammals… including myself, sadly.) Perhaps if I had been less distracted, I would have noticed the big dark eyes staring at me from a short distance away and approached more slowly. I stopped in my tracks and even backed up a few feet… sometimes this is enough to put our resident deer at ease and they will just go back to what they were doing. But the mother deer munching on Toyon in front of me had two fawns with her and I think she thought better of sticking around. They started to disappear into the dense brush. I simply watched them go. Despite my desire to take wonderful photos, I try never to chase after animals. I have no desire to alarm or frighten them — even if it means that I miss the shot. After a few minutes, I wandered past the area they had been and looked up into the foliage on the hill rising before me. At first I didn’t see anything, but I heard a bit of crashing as one of the fawn dashed to keep up with its mother. I managed to take a few images, though the second fawn never came back into view…

As I was taking the above photo, the flies began to descend on me in the most merciless of ways. I already felt a bit wilted from the heat and I hadn’t even walked up the hill yet. Still, when you can come home with memories like these, it’s hard not to smile.