Our neighborhood, which is a pretty average suburb with some very busy streets, backs up against a heavily wooded neighborhood that is completely self-contained — no through traffic at all except for people going to the country club in the middle of their neighborhood. My friend Iris (one of those people whose sincere love for animals is completely unsentimental) once remarked that the club neighborhood would be “lousy with deer.” We doubted that the deer would ever wander over to our side, though; there are only two sidewalks and a back road connecting the two neighborhoods, and we figured that the traffic and lack of hiding places in our neighborhood would make it unattractive to deer.
Or so we thought, until last week, when I stepped out my front door at eight o’clock in the morning and found a deer standing in the yard across the street. The traffic whizzed by. Suddenly he leapt across the street, and in four great bounds he was over our side fence and in our back yard. I ran back inside and yelled for my husband and for Hambet. We stared at him out our patio window. He paced around, stared back at us for a long minute, and then jumped over the fence into the neighbor’s yard.
I wasn’t thinking about that yesterday, though. It was around two in the afternoon. I had been digging the new flower bed, and I was concentrating on putting in the tulip bulbs and finishing the bed before the rain came. Hambet was bored with gardening and was playing inside. I thought I heard him come back outside. I looked up. The deer was standing about ten feet away from me.
We stared at each other for a moment, and then the deer took off again towards the back of the shed. I looked around the corner to watch him leap over the fence, but instead I found him coming straight towards me! I made some kind of eek! noise, and he turned tail and ran back around the shed to the other corner of our lawn. He cleared the neighbor’s tall fence with one great leap and ran off, back towards the wooded neighborhood.
I know deer are supposed to be more common that people think in suburban neighborhoods, but I’m still amazed that I’ve seem him twice now, especially in the middle of the day, and especially from just ten feet away (three feet, if you count when he was coing around the back of the shed). I’ve never been that close to a deer. I’m glad Hambet was inside; I don’t know what the deer would have done if Hambet went running up to him. Maybe I should call animal control and see if there’s anything I should do if he gets so close again.
And what do these Bambi sightings mean for my tulips this spring?
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Sounds like bad news for your tulips, Peony. That reminds of me of a stop in Ashland, Oregon, last year with my oldest boy on the way to do a little fishing. We were driving down a residential street, about two blocks from a busy commercial district, and there we spied one of the largest bucks I have ever seen strolling leisurely down the sidewalk.
>:( great. Why couldn’t the critter have made his appearance before I did all that planting? Even if they don’t come around much in the spring, I understand that all it takes is one evening’s work for one of those things to wipe out a flower bed.
I think I saw the same deer, made reckless by the rutting season and bold by his success at crossing the streets. He thinks he’s all that because he hasn’t gotten hit by a car yet. I’m just worried that if he survives the winter, he’ll have put our street on his beat and keep coming around looking for snacks.
You can try coyote urine! Don’t worry, they sell it like fertilizer. : ) It tells the deer to stay away!
This is a significant part of why I don’t grow flowers or vegetables anymore: I like having rabbits and things in the yard, and I don’t wish to create mixed feelings about them. Besides, I’m getting too stiff in the back to do much gardening anymore.