What would you do if you saw a human baby alone without its mother?
You probably wouldn’t leave it alone, but what if it was a baby deer?
Big-hearted Albertans faced with this scenario often choose to bring the baby deer, also called fawns, to animal hospitals. A kind act that, unfortunately, causes more harm than good.
The animal kingdom plays by very different rules than humans. When a mother deer, or doe, leaves its fawn alone, it’s usually only temporary.
Unaware of this, well-intentioned people are “kidnapping” fawns and taking them away from their mothers.
Most fawns are born during the last week of May or the first week of June, although some are born as late as August.
During the first month after birth, fawns spend most of their time away from their mothers. This period can be broken up into three phases: the bed phase, the flush phase, and the active phase.
The bed phase lasts for the first five to eight days of a fawn’s life and involves inactivity. Fawns spend most of this phase bedded on the ground alone.
A doe will visit its fawn several times daily to feed it and move it to a new location.
A fawn might drop its head, flatten its ears, or even stop breathing if it is threatened. A doe will avoid its fawn if humans or pets are nearby until the threat has passed.
The fawns remain incredibly still, even when a human or animal comes near. You may have heard of the myth that fawns have no scent.
Fawns do have a scent but it is very faint, making it difficult for predators to pick up on. While fawns might appear most vulnerable to predators during the bed phase, it is the safest time.
On The Move
The flush phase is the first eight to 30 days of a fawn’s life. Like the bed phase, the fawn spends most of its time still and alone, with infrequent visits from its mother.
During the flush phase, a fawn might run to a new spot and hide when a threat is nearby. Fawns are also more vocal and cry or bleat when people are nearby or trying to find their mother.
The active phase begins when a fawn is about a month old. Fawns are more active during the active phase and are strong enough to flee from predators.
Fawns are also seen more often exploring their environment and spending time with their families. When they find fawns alone, people are most likely to accidentally kidnap them during the bed and flush phases.
These ‘rescued’ fawns are often brought to animal hospitals like the Alberta Institute for Wildlife Conservation (AIWC).
So many people are bringing fawns to the AIWC that the hospital is at capacity.
“We’ve had a lot of fawns…some of whom did not need to be brought into the hospital in the first place. So about half of our patients of the eight fawns we’ve got were accidentally kidnapped from the wild,” AIWC executive director Katrina Terrill told CBC News.
According to the AIWC, deer fawns are left by their mothers for up to six hours, usually to forage for food or avoid leading predators to their young.
“If a fawn is sitting in the grass very quietly and does not look to be in any distress, the best thing you can do for them is leave them be,” suggests Terrill.
The fewer kidnapped fawns the AIWC has to deal with, the more space the hospital has to help fawns that need help.
There are a few ways to identify a fawn in distress, the most obvious being shrivelled-up ears, walking around in public areas alone, and crying.
A Deer In Need
Of the eight deer in the AIWC’s care, only three were orphaned and needed urgent care.
The first was walking through a neighbourhood, while the second was found dehydrated, skinny, and with shrivelled-up ears, a telltale sign that the fawn had been abandoned.
The third fawn was in the worst shape of the bunch after being hit by a car and is still recovering from the accident. Unfortunately, the AIWC doesn’t have the space or manpower to board any more fawns.
Instead, the hospital is referring further admissions to other animal care centres in the Calgary-Cochrane area.
Terrill expects the eight fawns in the AIWC’s care to remain at the hospital until the middle of September. Until then, the AIWC must invest much time and money in caring for the fawns.
When fawns are first brought to the hospital, they are at risk of severe stress that can cause organ failure, a symptom of capture myopathy.
Capture myopathy is a non-infectious disease that can cause depression, muscle stiffness or weakness, tremors, paralysis, rapid heart rate, death, and more in deer and other hoofed animals.
In addition to managing the risk of capture myopathy, the AIWC often has to feed fawns with intravenous fluids or special diets to stop their digestive systems from crashing, which costs about $40 per day.
Staff spend two to three hours a day caring for just their fawns. The hospital has a capacity of 240 animals and is currently caring for about 220.
The final obstacle the AIWC faces when caring for fawns is preparing the animals for release.
Like a strict parent kicking their kids out of the house at 17, staff must show fawns tough love to prepare them for the wild.
“So we’ll go in and bang pots and pans around; we’ll make sure that they are scared of humans and not trying to approach them for food. Because when we release them, we don’t want them to be used to people,” explained Terrill.
While it would be fun to live in harmony with nature like a Disney princess, sometimes humans and wildlife go together like water and oil, and fawns are no exception.
The more time fawns spend around people, the greater the likelihood they end up in vehicle collisions or attacked by pets.
If you are an accidental fawn kidnapper, don’t sweat it. The AIWC takes good care of its fawns and works hard to reintegrate them into herds for the winter.
The story’s moral is that if you see a fawn alone that is not in distress, leave it alone. The odds are that its mother is nearby, giving you the death stare from a distance.
