NY Dept. of Environmental Conservation

This week’s column addresses the ongoing problem of people bringing home white-tailed fawns they think are abandoned:

Every June, just after white-tailed deer start bearing their young, people find “abandoned” fawns and try to help them.

Instead, they end up killing them.

Not on purpose, of course. But dead is dead, regardless of intent.

Officials at the West Virginia Wildlife Center in French Creek average 30 to 50 calls a year from people who find fawns lying curled up, seemingly alone, and “rescue” them by taking them home. Rob Silvester, the center’s resident biologist, said the number of “I’ve got this fawn” calls is up sharply this year.

“We thought we had done a pretty good job of educating people to avoid picking up fawns, but apparently not,” he said. “The bottom line is this: Fawns can never really be raised by humans and put back into the wild. And in almost every single case, fawns people think are ‘abandoned’ are not abandoned at all.”

Does with young fawns often leave them, sometimes for hours at a time. The fawns instinctively remain motionless to avoid the attention of predators. Humans who find the fawns mistakenly assume they’re hurt, weakened by malnutrition, or paralyzed with fear.

“They’re really just waiting for Mama to come back,” Silvester explained. “The very best thing a person can do for those fawns is to walk around them and leave them alone. As soon as a human removes a fawn from the wild, the fawn essentially loses its chance to survive in the wild.

“Most wildlife learn the survival skills they’ll need in adulthood during the first few weeks after birth. In Missouri, they kept track of fawns that had been raised by people and released back to the wild. Within a year, almost all those fawns were dead.”

Some people who find fawns take them home and try to feed them. Silvester believes that’s a grave mistake:

“We can’t really substitute what they get from their mothers,” he said. “People will try to give them whole milk, or will mix up some kind of formula. What they end up doing is giving the fawn a bad case of diarrhea, and it ends up dying of dehydration.

“Even here [at the Wildlife Center] we have trouble getting the formula right, and we’re trained biologists. And even when we are able to raise them on milk, we lose 50 percent of them when we try to wean them. There’s something about the natural weaning process we simply don’t know how to match.”

Silvester said humans should only attempt to rescue fawns that can be confirmed as orphaned. “Some cases are apparent. If a doe gets hit by a car and killed, and if a fawn is hanging around the carcass, that’s when you should call [the Division of Natural Resources].

“When we get those fawns, we take them to a place in the wild where we know beyond a doubt there are does with fawns about the same age. When does find lone fawns wandering around, they usually adopt them.”

When Silvester gets calls from people who have taken fawns into their homes, he gives them some simple but direct advice – take them back.

“The very best thing to do is to take a fawn back and put it where you found it. Don’t hang around waiting for the doe to show. She won’t with you around. But usually, within a couple of hours, she’ll come back and reclaim that fawn,” he said.

Despite the current rash of pick-ups, Silvester said the scene at the Wildlife Center is nothing like it was during the late 1980s, when people were less knowledgeable about fawns.

“Back then, we had literally hundreds of fawns here every year,” he said. “We get a lot fewer now than we did then, but we’d like to get fewer still.”