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deer
November 2009 
My doe
Posted on Nov 12th, 2008
by 
ingebrita
ingebrita
Yesterday a wonderful thing happened to me. I was visiting at my dad's house in the woods, where spotting deer, coyotes, wild turkeys and fishers is not at all unusual. (Haven't seen any bears, yet, though they have been seen in Connecticut lately.) We were watching a movie when my brother-in-law noticed a doe in the yard, quite close to the house. Being so enchanted with deer I jumped up to see her. She was so beautiful with her large soft eyes and large ears lined in dark brown. Our eyes met and she stood there transfixed for a very long time. I could not take my eyes off of her. After a while she lay down and continued to stare at me, occasionally looking about to see what a noise was, but then fixing her gaze back onto me. She seemed so peaceful and I wondered what, if anything, it all meant. Then I started to worry that my looking at her so intently might be threatening her in some way. But she did seem relaxed. At one point a buck appeared and walked right past her and started helping himself to Dad's rhododendron. John was going to go shoo him away but I begged him not to. After the buck had enough food he slowly retraced his steps and passed the doe again, glanced at her but seemed unconcerned with her behavior. She ignored him completely. After another long while she stood up and started nibbling at the ground, looking at me once in a while. She slowly made her way downhill around the corner of the house, so I changed my vantage point to another window on that side of the house. She was now one story below me. But she looked up to the window and saw me again and started looking at me again with the same intensity as before. Her look felt so reassuring in some way. It's hard to put words to it. It was getting darker and darker until I could barely see her, and just at the point where I felt I could see her no longer she suddenly darted away. More than an hour had passed. I feel as if I was given quite a gift!
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Hi Barbara, Oh yes truly a gift the Doe obviously trusted you, wild animals are instinctive and like us have a natural curiosity.
I had a similar experience about 59 years ago when I was a child with a white fluffy baby owl on a low branch in the woods, an interchange of trust with no words, I was spellbound and have never forgotten it.
Hi Barbara and Zephyr,
I had a similar experience, on a smaller scale. Mine was with a butterfly on my screen when the window was open. We silently communicated for quite a while. I know the spellbound feeling.
Hi Dorothy, precious moments aren’t they, we have four dottie cats !!!!!
This is one of the things I love best about Gaia, finding people who have experienced similar things.
We had an outdoor midsummer celebration last year and managed to get my father outside in the garden in his wheelchair. When it came time to bring him inside my sister discovered a Luna moth on the screen door of the kitchen, so we all had a good long look at it. Dad said he hadn’t seen one since he was a kid on the farm. I don’t think I had ever seen one before, but I had recenly read about them in Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, where they are used as a metphor for one of her characters… Can’t say I communicated with this one, but its appearance that night did seem magical!
Zephyr, I had an owl experience too, with a brown owl when I was a teenager. We bobbed at each other for a while, across a school corridor…it was out during the waning day.
I was visiting Dorothy’s grapevine, and saw she’d come here, and came on over!
Barbara, looks like you’ve touched a memory chord in us all. The neighborhood cat, no one’s pet; but our friend, has long staring sessions with me; and I am surprised when he does. Sometimes, he looks away, and then looks back again when I do likewise; but otherwise, I feel he plants thoughts in my head when he does.
Your encounter with the wild doe is magical. I can just picture it.
Thank you all for sharing your experiences - Gael, Dorothy, and Meenakshi - this is so wonderful… A memory cord, indeed.
While I was in Florida this week another memory came back to me, no doubt because I was near the Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge, which was created specifically for the protection of the endangered manatee. (Unfortunately we didn’t have time to visit…)
When I was little, I can’t remember how old, perhaps 7 or 8, we were visiting a seaquarium or a zoo (perhaps in Miami? - it was all outside), when I spent some time up close with and gazing at a manatee, who was confined to a very small pool. I felt so sorry for it, with all the hustle and bustle around it and not nearly enough room for it to move around freely, in my opinion. It seemed like such a peaceful being, and so plain that none of the passers-by spent any amount of time looking at it. But I was fascinated, having never seen one before! I stayed there with it and didn’t see any other animals that day. My parents came and collected me after they were finished looking at the rest of the place.
Years later I was going through some pictures I had taken with my first camera. I must have had someone in my family take a picture of me standing near the pool - the manatee was not visible in the picture. When I turned the picture over I had written on the back, “I fell in love with a manatee.” I felt embarrassed by the “childish” sentiment and tossed the picture out. Now I am sorry I did that because now I cherish the memory. How wonderful it must be now to be able to see them in their natural warm water springs environment in the refuge.