Hook and bullet club
Laying in the middle of Highway 21 just south of the transfer station last week was a roadkill deer.Looking as if at had laid down to rest in the southbound lane, the deer wasn’t a real big traffic hazard but I decided to turn around anyway.I pulled over, put my emergency blinkers on and grabbed a pair of gloves from underneath the seat so I could pull it off the road.This was a fawn born a couple of months ago although it still had the white spots along the sides.Obviously hit by a vehicle, the accident had just occurred and it looked as though the animal had been killed on contact.The front and rear legs were broken and blood ran from the mouth down the hill. Not a pretty sight but part of the routine in our neck of the North Country.One less doe is not likely to have a major effect on our deer population, but it was another indicator that there should be plenty of deer in the woods this fall.DNR biologists have been telling us that the deer population is on the rise and therefore they have increased the number of antlerless permits and even opened up areas to doe hunting where it has not traditionally been allowed.There are many ways to determine the deer population and the DNR has all sorts of formulas and equations to figure it all out. For the average guy, the number of deer in the woods are somewhat proportional to the number of deer you see on the roadsides, alive or dead.This summer there have been plenty of deer to be seen feeding alongside the road, seemingly at all hours of the day. It’s almost to the point where you don’t dynamite the brakes because it’s such a routine experience. Unless there’s one bounding toward the centerline, it’s best to just keep driving along.There’s an old joke about automobile body shops planting clover alongside the roadways to increase business. Judging by the vehicles around town that have been dinged up by deer, I’d say they can lay off the clover for awhile.Even seeing deer in town is getting to be routine. Along the Trezona Trail is one common spot for a sighting, but I live on Boundary Street and there’s been deer spotted between Second Avenue East and Central Avenue, a fairly congested neighborhood.But deer seem to edge further and further into town as their population rises (and of course when the wolves are pushing them into town as well). Now this spot where the fawn was hit is a hillside that must be one of the higher areas topographically. As summer starts to fade into fall, the leaves on the trees there always start to turn color before any other area. A sign of the changing seasons, the reds in the leaves tell us winter is just around the corner and we should enjoy the warm days instead of cursing them.But on Wednesday, the red came only from a fawn that learned its final lesson. With wolves and bears and other predators in the forest, sometimes the most dangerous place to be is trying to cross a highway.
