| Friday, July 24, 2009 |
19:34 - Nature Scenes We Rarely See
|
(top) |
Case in point: the back of a deer's head, from four feet away.
Deer around here seem to have no self-preservation instinct. In the middle of the storage facility a half an hour ago, there was this big doe standing in one of the little lawn areas as we drove right past, and it just stared at us from like ten feet away the whole time we were blasting engines and rolling up doors and stuff.
Apparently deer around here have decided that cars are completely uninteresting objects, and the source of nothing more than noise that they can tune out while they seek out ever more fascinating and exotic sources of grass.
There's this section of the Saw Mill Parkway that I drive to/from work every day where the median is broad and forested:
For the last couple of weeks there's been this mother and two fawns living in it. They've apparently decided that they're perfectly happy staying right in between the lanes, just a couple of feet from the cars hurtling past at 60+ mph. For the first week or so that they were up and on their feet and edging into the margins of sight from the fringes of greenery, the cars were all freaking out and slowing down when they'd see a white-speckled baby deer standing just like three feet from the edge of the inside lane; but now everyone just goes by at normal speed and the deer don't move—we know by now that they won't.
Today one of them was standing there, perfectly still and alert, ears up, facing AWAY from traffic into the trees in the middle of the greenbelt. It was hilarious. I suddenly realized: you never see the back of a deer's head that close up.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
