New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff

A singing robins starts my day and another dead deer to top it off.

Wednesday 04/06/2005

Spring is so rushing into New Hampshire this week. It is getting hard to keep track of all the new spring signs each day. Besides the legions of ducks down back, that are flittering about the flooded corn field in the spring ritual of several males chasing the females, there is the constant backdrop of sounds of red winged blackbirds calling. Even a song sparrow has chimed in a couple of times since yesterday.

I even heard my first singing robin of the year this morning. That in itself made my day early on. But I had a quest to locate a dead deer in a deer yard in Raymond. It was reported to me serendipitously yesterday. I had pulled over on the side of a back road in Deerfield to answer my cell phone just as a motor cycle came up behind me. The cycle went around me as I pulled over, then stopped, and the fellow walked back to my truck. "You wouldn't be a Fish and Game biologist would you?" he asked. He had spotted a dead deer the previous weekend not far from where I pulled over. He drew a map in the roadside gravel which I followed today to the deer. It wasn't much of a deer yard, although the new and old barking on the hemlocks indicated that a few deer had occasionally wintered there for some year.

It was a beautiful area with several vernal pools and three beaver ponds intertwined into the landscape as I hiked the half mile or so in from the road. By 9:30 the sun was shinning more and more as it danced with the whirling clouds above. I started parallel transects in the area he described the deer to be in. One turning point was at a gorgeous cascading brook in full spring flow. I couldn't help but stop a minute to drink in the view. It somewhat quenched the thirst that was growing in my throat.

In a few minute I spotted a spay of white deer hair against the dull brown forest floor. Not far away I spotted the remains of the deer. Just four days ago she was nearly whole based on his report. Today she was a skeleton of her former self. Literally.

The teeth revealed a very old deer, seven or eight by my inspection. It was a female. The lack of pulled hair scattered about suggested to me that this was not a deer killed by a predator such as a coyote, or from wandering house dogs. I don't know what killed her. I know she didn't die of malnutrition as her femur bone marrow was still loaded with fat. Firm white bone marrow filled her femur bone. She was in excellent health, but dead!

The day grew much warmer by mid afternoon. I had checked on a completed habitat project in New Market in the mean time. I even spotted some skunk cabbage at least six inches tall along a backwoods road. Ah, spring life was filling every nook and cranny of my world as the day slipped by. To top it off, a saw whet owl is calling down back this evening. Life is so good this week.