Deer Rescue: The day I drove around with a baby deer in my car

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Many mornings after I drop my son off at school, I walk around town with a couple friends and we attempt to shed the pounds from our dinner the night before. The walks are usually peaceful and uneventful with the exception of a couple days ago. The roads around the school are wooded and lined with gorgeous historic homes with lush manicured lawns, to die for homes ….really. As we were walking an itty bitty baby deer literally stumbled out into traffic and barely made it across the road. We were about 50 feet away and just stopped and couldn’t believe our eyes. His back leg appeared to be hurt and he just stopped on the side of the road not knowing where to go.

Not knowing what to do, we called our local police department and they sent an officer to assess the baby deer. He was clearly in distress. At this point, we thought he had been hit by a car.

After about an hour, with no mom in site, the officer wrapped the baby in a blanket and I offered to take it to our local animal hospital. I drove home grabbed a dog crate and off we went.

Seriously, bambi was in my car.

Many of you may say we should have left the deer alone but leaving him hurt on the side of the road with no mom deer in site, was not an option. Call me crazy! I don’t care ;).

After driving for 15 minutes or so, we learned from our local animal hospital that they couldn’t accept the deer, that Wildlife rescue needed to intervene. At this point I was like, “what the what!” am I going to do with this little guy? I mean, I can’t keep him!

We headed back to our local police station were we explained that the animal hospital wouldn’t take him and we didn’t know where else to bring it. So we placed the dog crate in the police station with the officers and their cruisers ;).

Wildlife rescue ended up getting involved and ultimately made the decision to place him back further in the woods near where he was found on the road. The Wildlife officer explained that even though he was weak and his leg appeared hurt, we needed to give the mom a chance to nurse him back to health. So the police officer placed him back in the woods and monitored throughout the day.

Can I just tell you, this is one crazy morning. What did I learn? I learned that next time, it probably would have been best to leave the deer and check back every so often to see if the mom deer returned. Although, leaving on the roadside was not an option. I mean, tooling around town with Bambi isn’t the wisest decision. With our limited Wildlife knowledge, we did the best we could given the circumstances. The baby deer will be taken by Wildlife if the mom doesn’t return and he continues to stagger around. Apparently, a local zoo would be willing to adopt him ;).

UPDATE: since writing this post, a group of deer were spotted by the police officer and the baby is gone from the wooded area it was returned to. We believe the momma deer came back and the baby is fine ;). Wildlife also explained that a human scent on a deer will not deter the mother deer from taking their baby back. Phew!