Don’t take young animals home

By PAUL DAVIS , Staff Writer

Here it is the end of May, and that means it’s the time of year when you’re most likely to find baby wildlife in places you may not normally find it. Baby birds, deer, raccoons … even newborn snakes — you’re sure to see one near your home. In late May and into the first week of June, the vast majority of deer fawns are born, and it’s not uncommon to find one curled up in a ball, lying motionless. Baby birds, without the benefit of flight feathers until they are a few weeks old, can be found hopping around the yard. What far too many people do in such a situation, however, is assume that baby is abandoned because its mother isn’t right there. Inevitably, they pick up the fawn, take it home (which is illegal), try to nurse it for a few weeks, then return it to the wild, where it will die in short order because it never learned to fend for itself. Sadly, that scenario is repeated over and over again every spring by well-meaning folks, and while they believe they are doing the wildlife a service, they actually are imposing a death sentence in almost every case. Rarely has the youngster’s mother actually abandoned it. Instead, she’s doing exactly what nature designed — not drawing attention to the baby. White-tailed does, for instance, will leave their perfectly camouflaged, spotted fawns on the forest floor for hours at a time while they go off to feed far enough away so as to not attract predators, like coyotes, to their young. Those fawns also are scent free, another way nature protects them from predation. During the first week or more after they are born, the built-in instinct for fawns is to lay motionless while their mother is away, relying on their camouflage to keep them safe. It’s just nature’s way. It’s sad the message has to be repeated so much, but don’t pick up the young wildlife. It is much better off without your so-called “help.” Many will say “the mother was hit by a car” or something to that effect, but how would they know it was the baby’s actual mother? With deer densities between a half dozen to around 40 per square mile in some areas, there’s just no way to really know. If you do happen to touch the animal, don’t worry about its mother abandoning it. That’s an old wive’s tale which just won’t go away, and nothing could be further from the truth. She has too much invested in her young to give up that easily. The honest, brutal truth is nature always provides more young of the year than the habitat can sustain, and some will be lost to predation, drought, disease and other factors. That doesn’t mean you should add to the tally unnecessarily. Remember ­— leave them alone.