Another Tough Mother

Speaking of tough mothers, I caught this one with my trail camera a couple weeks ago. I saved the photo, even though it was of poor quality, because of the visible injury, which is something you don't see every day. It doesn't look like anything a bullet, arrow, or other animal would cause. Maybe she was hit by a car. Be that as it may, the deer looks pretty perky in the picture, so it doesn't seem to have slowed her down a lot. Indeed, I saw the same deer a week or so later and she seemed to be healing up nicely. She managed to dodge the camera that day, but I saw that she was accompanied by another smaller deer, probably last years fawn, which is why I called her a mother. Pregnant does generally go into seclusion this time of year when they are ready to drop their new fawns. They drive last year's fawns away, but will allow them to return if their new fawn doesn't survive, or after it is about a month old, whichever happens first.

I seem to remember that those Asian carp got into the Mississippi watershed when a major flood breached the levee that separated the river from a fish farm. These fish are vegetarians, and they were being raised to clean out excess weed growth in private ponds. In most jurisdictions, it is illegal to introduce a non native plant or animal species into the wild without a special permit, but carp don't know nothing about the law.