Wildlife Rehabilitator

Only two idiots would try to rehabilitate a blind fawn. I'm married to one such idiot and she to another.

"Helen," as we affectionately call her, is a deer born without eyes. She came to us several years ago as a 1-week-old fawn that had somehow survived despite her handicap.

It takes a little extra effort to deal with a blind deer. As might be expected, her sense of hearing and smell are extra sensitive to offset her lack of sight. We announce ourselves when approaching and hold out our hand so that she can smell our presence before we touch her. Sort of a "smello hello" combination.

The hair in Helen's ears is much denser than any other deer. The inside of the ears of the other deer are framed with long white hairs, but Helen's are almost solidly filled with these hairs. We suspect it has to do with the fact she has developed extraordinary hearing to make up for her lack of sight.

She can recognize who is walking past by the sound of their foots.jpg. She can tell the difference between my foots.jpg and Cyndi's. Since Cyndi does most of the feeding, Helen is attracted to her. She shies away from unrecognized foots.jpg unless Cyndi or I are there to talk to her.

Deer have ears that operate independently of each other. Each ear can be aimed like a radar dish to ide.jpgy the location of a sound. It is fascinating to watch Helen as her ears moves in different directions honing in on the slightest noise. After she determines where a sound is coming from in the left and right plane, she cocks her head 90 degrees sideways and zeroes in on the height of the sound.

Most fawns will nurse from a bottle, but Helen would not drink from one, apparently disliking the sensation of an unseen nipple nudging her mouth. She drank her milk from a bowl. She grew much slower than the other fawns and was the last one to lose her spots many months after the others.

Animals have the ability to sense medical problems and will often administer care to each other. As each of our other deer met Helen, they would immediately begin licking around her eye area obviously aware she had a problem.

As a baby, Helen's friend Spot, "The deer that thought it was a dog," was allowed in the house to visit. Helen immediately recognized the sound of Spot's hooves and ran to her. She loved having Spot to follow around.

There was a downside to letting Spot visit. Spot did not like the barriers we had set up for Helen's protection, so the first thing she did was to push them all down and take Helen on a tour of the restricted areas of the house. When Spot was the tour guide, we would find the two troublemakers anywhere from the kitchen to the bathroom playing in the wastebasket.

As Helen and Spot grew up, they shared a pen outside and remained best friends. Spot was allowed out of the enclosure to roam free during the day but always returned to spend nights and mornings with Helen. With Spot's help, Helen learned the boundaries of her living space. She could walk straight to her feeding dish, find covered sleeping space or trot right up to the fence without any collisions.

Helen gets exercise running in circles on sand we placed in the center of her enclosure. She knows that as long as she can feel the sand, she can run fast without obstacles to worry about.

The only significant time Spot and Helen spent apart was when Spot left to give birth to twin fawns. Once the fawns were weaned, Spot returned to spend time with Helen again. She even brought her fawns with her on several occasions, allowing them to nuzzle Helen, who in turn groomed them like a favorite aunt.

Spot passed away last spring, but Helen is doing quite well. There are a couple of deer in rehabilitation that will spend time with her for a few hours at a time, but they prefer to roam most of the time. Almost every day she is visited through the fence by friendly deer, including Spot's babies.

Over the years Helen has become a bit of a celebrity around the wildlife refuge. She gets more mail addressed to her than all the other animals combined.

HOW YOU CAN HELP: The Witter Wildlife Refuge rescues and rehabilitates injured and orphaned wildlife. It is funded entirely by donations, which are greatly appreciated and should be made out to Witter Wildlife Refuge at P.O. Box 1118, Huntsville, Ark. 72740. On the Web at witterwildliferefuge.com

FOR WILDLIFE EMERGENCIES: You can locate a wildlife rehabilitator on the Internet at: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~devo0028/contactA.htm

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