Puddock Hill Journal #24: Compassion meets frustration when our young trees get mowed down.
Spring. The trees soften. The grass greens. The peepers serenade. We begin to catch glimpses of deer fawns, spotted, delicate, innocent, unsteady on their legs.
A doe has been hanging about in the dedicated open space outside our deer fence, owned by the development constructed on land that once went with our house. It has everything she might want: tall grass, a bit of woods, a stream to provide water.
One day, we see her with a pair of newborn fawns beside the driveway. They observe us as we come and go through the main gate, day after day. They haven’t learned fear yet.
Soon they linger a bit closer, near the deer fence on the hill by the tenant house. I see them in the morning sleeping by the tenant house gate. The gate sits high so it can accommodate the slope when it opens. A fawn could get under there, but they’d be scraping along blacktop. Under the fence itself run a pair of high-tension wires, but ground is by nature uneven and there are dips in places.