The little Alaska paddock has a random grass mix seeded last fall and now the spring growth has hit it needs to be mowed down . As I was checking it out pre-mow I found this little critter.
His Ma and Pa were off eating somewhere else on the farm and had left junior to take his nap. There were several spots around where the big guys had slept.
OK, so I can’t mow the paddock right now. It needs a mow – when the mowed grasses and weeds break down they’ll aid the regrowth of thicker grass.
I did get to pat the little guy. Just think, in twelve months he/she will be breaking my fences. That’s better than making a little stain on my flail mower.
grasspunk.com 
What a beautiful deer – I guess though that an encounter with the flail mower would be lethal. Are they seen as pests?
Hey Sarah,
Lethal is the word. There are about twenty ‘hammers’ that swing on a horizontal bar spinning at several hundred rpm. It smashes up tree branches to a couple of inches in thickness. I use it because it mulches the grass well and cleans up any molehills or irregularities.
Usually the critters run at the sound of the tractor, but this little guy was so calm he let me pat him. Or her, I don’t know much about fawns. I think he was very newly born, like a day or two old. The parents were grazing at the end of the paddock later that day so they weren’t far away..
The local chasse/hunt manages them every year, so they are seen more as sport than pests. They love keeping the population going. They’ve broken the fences and gate handles a few times in the year and a half we have been here.
But they do give you vension every now and then: http://bratlikeme.com/2011/01/06/raw-meat-in-a-glad-bag/
Ah, thanks for the description! I had no idea about the hammers – it must be a bit like going through a mulcher.
I hope this little one doesn’t play around with your fences and gates when it gets older, especially since you avoided making it into mush the other day : ) Ending up as venison after a happy adolescence sounds much better!
What an adorable, precious fawn! You can tell I saw “Bambi” at a young and impressionable age, the way I’m fawning over this baby! 🙂 The very word “flail” mower makes me cringe! I don’t mind seeing pieces of chopped snake after I mow–although they make me shudder, thinking they might have flown through the air to land on me. Gag! But pieces of Bambi? It doesn’t bear thinking about! Glad you checked, and thank you for taking your camera along when you go mowing! 🙂
So cute, and you patting him /her is pretty rare. Last year our grass got long and leggy and so we topped it, which is what we do in NZ, but I am not in NZ, i am on the prairie and it never rained again and the grass literally died. It did not come back until this spring. A disaster. I ran out of fodder way too fast. So this year i am going to pretend i am farming in Hawkes Bay, letting it grow and they can just keep munching on the seeds. I don’t know which is better. But seeing the remaining grass brown off and die was miserable last year and this year we have even less rain. Maybe I should bale it! c
Very cute! Hopefully they little family will move along and not bother the fences or meet your mower!