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.
\nOr 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.
\nI 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.
\nWe 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!<\/i> 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.
\nI 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.
\nAnd what do these Bambi sightings mean for my tulips this spring?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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… Continue reading Wild Kingdom comes to the Prussian Green Money Pit<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}