Freelancer frees fenced fawn

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a story about fawning season for The Nugget. What I learned from reporting that story may have saved a fawn's life.

On Saturday I was doing another story for The Nugget at the Camp Polk Cemetery. I arrived a few minutes early, and as I was getting out of my car, I noticed a doe off to my left. It was bounding around, staring at me and just acting pretty strangely.

Thinking of the story I'd just written about fawning season, I thought the unusual behavior might be due to its fawn being nearby. Sure enough, after looking around for a couple minutes, I spied a tiny fawn near a fence. It stood motionless, as I had learned that fawns will do to conceal themselves.

Just then, Barbara Lee of the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council drove up. I waved her down and suggested we retreat down the road to let the fawn and mother reunite. As I retrieved my notebook and camera from the car, I thought I'd catch a quick picture of the little fawn.

As I took the picture, it began bleating and struggling, and I realized it was trapped in the wire fence. The front half of its body was on one side, and its back half on the other, with its rear legs stuck through the fence holes.

Luckily, Barbara had a blanket in her car, which she used to carefully wrap around the fawn's front half, while we extricated its legs and back half from the fence and then pulled it through the opening.

Barbara carried the little guy closer to where the mother deer was prancing around watching us. She gently opened the blanket to release the fawn, which quickly found its feet and bounded off, reunited with its mother.

If I hadn't reported the fawning story, I would never have thought of the doe's behavior as perhaps being the result of her endangered fawn. Knowing the fawn would probably be motionless helped me to locate it.

Reporting is always interesting, but this week it had a special reward