Whitetail Deer

Well, it's a strange day when the deer outnumber the goats! Only Maggie and Fancy were not locked in the barnyard, since I had just milked them. In the picture above there are 3 deer, plus Maggie.

The older deer has her yearling daughter with her almost every day. Sometime around August the first she had a fawn. She looked VERY pregnant, then one day we noticed she was missing. A few days later she showed up looking emaciated. You can see every rib, and it looks to be getting worse rather than better.

She has what looks like "bottle jaw" which is a condition goats get when they have a heavy worm load. So, I have been putting alfalfa pellets and oats out for her in a pile in the grass along with the corn that I usually scatter around. Tomorrow I am going to pick up some pellets at TSC that have worm meds in them and put them out for the 2 whitetail does when all the goats are locked in the barn so they dont gobble them up. (Yeah, I know I'm a sucker, but if she dies, her fawn that's out there somewhere is going to die too.)

In the picture below, the smallest deer at the back is a little orphan named PJ. We feed him goat milk from a bottle, but he is free to come and go as he pleases. He prefers to hang out in the barn with the Boer goats all day because I keep their feeder full of pellets. At the evening milking time I INSIST that he leave the barn and go be a deer all night long! The next morning he'll be waiting at the barn gate asking to be let back in with the little goats.

Right when I snapped this picture PJ reared up on his back legs and said "Eht" which can be loosely translated as "Where's my bottle?"
And this picture is simply to make you DIZZY!