Intruders

I was just out walking when I saw a couple of intruders fleeing from someone's backyard - two white-tailed deer, the second one hopping the four-foot fence like an Olympic hurdler. They filed out through the camouflaging gray-brown thicket, white tails waving 'so long!', then they were gone.

Their tails seemed exceptionally fluffy and I wondered if I hadn't seen them that close before or if they grow fatter with the cold weather. Last week when I walked by the Tower Hill Farm, the horses' coats had turned into wooly thick blankets. The foal born in the spring trotted over to check me out and nibble at my fleece jacket, while the couple of mares eyed me and continued chomping grass. One of them was sporting inadvertent forelock decorations of well-knotted-in burrs.

Apparently it's deer mating season in this area. Here's some information I found online:

During September, deer molt to a highly insulative coat which consists of a dense layer of fine woolly hair under a layer of long hollow brown, gray, and white guard hairs. The guard hairs can be erected to form a very thick insulative coat, which protects against the cold winds of winter. [link]

 

Whitetail deer are the most nervous and shy of our deer. They wave their tails characteristically from side to side when they are startled and fleeing. They are extremely agile and may bound at speeds of up to 30 miles per hour through tangled terrain in a forest. [link]

 

The winter coat of the northern deer has hollow hair shafts, which fill with air, making the coat so buoyant that it would be difficult for the animal to sink should it become exhausted while swimming. The White-tailed Deer is also a graceful runner, with top speeds to 36 mph (58 km/h), although it flees to nearby cover rather than run great distances. This deer can make vertical leaps of 8 1/2 feet (2.6 m) and horizontal leaps of 30 feet (9 m). [link]

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