Oh Give Me a Home Where the White-Tailed Deer Roam . . .

 

by Pa Rock

Nature Lover

The deer seem to sense when the shooting is about to start.

Yesterday in the mid-morning I stood on the back porch and watched three deer, a doe and two half-grown fawns, timidly working their way toward the chicken coop, eating grain that I had scattered on the ground for the chickens.  They kept edging closer and closer to the old building, undoubtedly eying the corn that was inside scattered on the floor.  As I stepped off of the porch and headed to the mailbox on the other side of the house, Mama and her youngsters bounded off toward the pond, but when I came back a couple of minutes later, there they were again, nibbling their way up to the coop.

This morning, just before daylight, I walked out by the pond and saw five young white-tailed deer running along the foggy fence line, and rarely does a day go by that I don't seen a few crossing the country lane and trotting across the yard.  Deer are very comfortable here and know that I would never cause them any harm.  And there is the corn, and the chops, and the apple cores that I leave around the pond.  Some days the squirrels enjoy an apple treat, and some days a hungry deer does.

But the hunting season looms large, and my white-tailed friends will soon go into hiding until the shooting finally stops around mid-December.  The first "youth portion" of firearms deer hunting season is October 30th and 31st which puts kids in the woods with guns over Halloween, a brilliant move on some bureaucrat's part.  Then there is the "main portion" of the kill, November 13th through the 23rd, where Bubba and his adult friends climb up into their makeshift tree houses and see how much beer they can guzzle between occasional bursts of gunfire.  November 26th through 28th is the late "youth portion," and finally there is a hunt for "anterless" deer from December 4th to December 12th.

Many local liquor stores run beer on sale during hunting season.

I am not opposed to deer hunting because there are plenty of families in this area who need the meat, and the deer population obviously requires "thinning,"  but I do regret the near carnival atmosphere that the hunting season seems to generate, from drunks with guns stumbling around in the woods to newspaper photos of grinning young children standing next to glassy-eyed dead deer.

The deer frolicking around my little acreage provide me with more emotional sustenance than than a whole truckload of crappy summer sausage could ever hope to do!

Hide well, my friends, and be safe!