Deer Galore (lots and lots of photos)

[CaraRose]

This has been a good weekend for deer. The nature center was loaded with them yesterday, plus I spotted a doe in LaBagh Woods while taking the robin pictures.

Doe, LaBagh Woods


Her face was in the sun and I totally blew it out, drat it.


Big Buck, North Park Village Nature Center






Apparently he thought he and I were sharing some sort of secret


Family wandering down the trail by the savannah area


Buck #2, over by the savannah area


Buck #3, also over by the savannah area


Was shooting into the sun, but turned out all right


Buck #2 and Buck #3


Buck #3
#2 decided to move on


Apparently we're itchy




Family of Five

It looked to me like three fawns (mostly grown) and their mom's. Might have been the same group I saw on the trails earlier. They came to the nature center's bird feeders to eat the spilled seed.









Some kids went running by, startling her


All five




Seriously... why are deer winking at me?? :P
















Okay, thanks for hanging in through all of those

[OldClicker]

Great set. Deer are really great to watch - they can be so curious at times. I find the 'preserve' deer are much more tame, but less curious. - TF

[paulnj]

Awesome series! That first buck has a great rack and surely had a few battles judging by the broken tines.

[scott-devon]

Excellent shots, I'd love to see that many deer up close.

[CaraRose]

You got to move to the city to see them up close, Scott

Really, it's not a great situation. The nature center is a small 40 acre preserve, with a small wetlands in the middle, and in a two hour span I saw 8-12 deer, depending on whether the family I saw on the trail was the same I saw later at the bird feeder. It's a big issue in the area, because the population is so large.

The nature preserve has a good sized city park to one side, and three busy streets surrounding it on the others. They estimate the area has around 50 deer, and while its not as bad as the doom criers make out about it (there's three large cemeteries across those busy streets that the deer also spread into, and one of those cemeteries borders a smaller Chicago forest preserve. So the land they have to spread out and forage on is bigger than it's made out to be, but it still is a large population for the acreage available to them. The park district has wanted to have a sharpshooter come and cull the herd, and this gets some folks in the community flipping out, so they end up having to give in and leave the herd be. In midwinter some of them look pretty bad. I love being able to see so many deer, but I'd much rather have the population brought under control than to see them over graze the preserves and parks and starve.

There's similar problems with a lot of our preserves. We have lots of preserves, but they're all cut off from each other by busy streets or entire neighborhoods. And the deer populations, especially in smaller ones, are just overrunning them.

[BJW]

Nice shots of the beauties!

[mn shutterbug]

I guess I've had my deer fix for the month. Nice series. I like how the one buck is winking at you.