Bambi: beware

Last night I took all three kids to the music store where two of them have music lessons.

As we were leaving the parking lot, I noticed deer in the front of the business across the street. Now, this is not a music store in the middle of the forest, like in some Disney movie. It is on a three lane major roadway, with traffic lights, grocery stores, apartment buildings, churches, banks, restaurants, and the police station.

I cut across the street and pulled into the parking lot to the middle school and parked. There were ten does in the group, all of whom appeared to be young. They grazed in the lawn of the middle school; I rolled closer. They gazed at the car for a minute and went right on nibbling. Eventually, they crossed the parking lot one by one, passing no more than ten feet away from us.

When I was growing up here, we never saw the deer, although I am sure we had them. Periodically, one would get its front leg caught in a wire fence on someone's property and have to be shot or we would see tracks in the snow. However, there was enough room for both of us. People would say that they are encroaching on our territory, but I would say that we moved first.

We do have deer by the house, but we see them maybe once or twice a month--EG has let the acre next to the house go back to its natural state so the deer have somewhere to go. However, there are no more natural predators for the deer, and they are multiplying. The night I was a herd of three does and a buck standing along a five lane road in the nearby city, waiting to cross the street, I realized we had blurred the lines between nature and suburbia.

What I realized this morning is that the deer were ingesting chemically treated grass. So one day, does this mean that these mild creatures will be conducting an uprising, with their mutant antlers, sharp fangs, and glowing green eyes?