It’s the only place on the mountain where a deer can get a drink!
Deer can be like people sometimes. The boys hang out with other boys and the girls hang out with other girls. This year, one of the girls always brought along her twins. The boys get into fights but the girls just hang out. The twins run around and play hide-and-seek.
The boys are starting to get really horny. These three showed up and showed off their new accoutrements. Right now, they’re still “in the velvet”. In a few months, they’re going to strip off and display what they got in all their glory. They use the sharp edges of Yucca plants to help them clean that fuzz off their antlers. It makes me cringe. Those Yucca spears are sharp and I wonder if they ever misjudge and get a sharp point in the eye. I see deer with broken legs with depressing frequency, but I’ve never seen one with an eye injury.
In late fall and winter, the fights start. I watched Seven Point stott across Happy Hillside to show his stuff once. He would bound across kicking up the dust with a young deer half his size right behind him.
Actually, the fights usually just look like pushing contests most of the time. They’re not like mountain sheep who actually “ram” each other. (I wonder if that’s where the word “ram” came from.) But the deer just push each other back and forth for a while and then relax and have a drink together. Since I’ve watched these fights, I’ve discovered that there is more to it than just pushing. They lock their antlers together, and then try to flip each other over.
Usually, they’re evenly matched and all that happens is pushing. But I saw one flip another once. A younger deer took on the leader of the pack and learned why the other deer was the leader. The old boy had a wonderful rack! He locked into the younger one and flipped him completely over. The young interloper struggled to his feet, jumped across a low wall onto my back patio, and ran down into Surprise Wash to get away. I looked over the battle ground. It was torn up with deer hair all over. It was quite a battle.
When Roxy and I hiked from Kolob across the plateau and down into Zion Canyon, we camped over night at a spring. There were deer there too, for the water, but also because hikers fed them. So, what does a hiker have that a deer would like? Candy bars … maybe some chips or twinkies. All of those deer had severe “digestive” problems. You could see it when they were walking away from you. I don’t think they were in very good health.
Just so you know, the only thing we feed our deer is pellets formulated just for wild deer – and a few vegetable scraps. The ingredients label on the pellets read like multi-vitamin pills. The deer that come to my house are healthy.
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