Monday, June 24, 2024
PARKER COUNTY — A week-old white-tail fawn found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time when a misplaced survival mechanism caused it to lay flat in the middle of Azle’s Southeast Parkway. Just before the Loop 344 bridge, known locally as the “ski jump,” that connects westbound Southeast Parkway to Main Street, a man driving a Spectrum internet truck stopped to motion drivers away from the animal and watched in horror as multiple vehicles passed right over, barely missing Bambi.
The last car to pass over the poor dear was a beat-up 2005 Honda Civic with a long history of transmission problems driven by Azle reporter, Zach Freeman. He noticed the concern on the man’s face before he saw the deer, but by pure luck it passed between both sets of tires unscathed. After a call to animal control and attempts to leave the fawn in the woods about 1,000 feet away proved unsuccessful (the fawn kept following Freeman back up to the road) the pair decided the best course of action was to take the fawn to the nearby Tri-County Reporter news office and figure out a plan from there. At the office, sales rep Lora Paschal promptly named the fawn Frog, and the reporter soon found a haven for the animal just a 35-minute drive away.
Carrie Long is the founder and operator of Texas Fawn and Friends in Poolville. When Long received Frog, she already had another 35 fawns in her care, two of which had been brought to her in the last 12 hours. Long said she typically receives two to four new fawns per day in late May and early June, her busiest season and the time when most fawns are born. The fawns currently residing at the nonprofit, which doubles as her home, range from just a few days to one month old. Long gets calls for deer in all situations with many of her charges having been struck by cars or found beside dead does on the side of the road. Sometimes, when a doe has twins or triplets, it may also abandon the babies it can’t care for, Long said. It is not uncommon for others to be “fawn napped.”
“Every one of them has a story,” Long said. “Sometimes they get stolen, they shouldn’t have been taken. Most people don’t understand what the doe is trying to do, and they hide them for their safety.”
When a doe encounters a predator, they will often flee and attempt to draw the predator away from their baby in a chase. In these instances, Long said the best thing to do is not approach the fawn and to instead leave and wait for the deer to come back and retrieve her offspring.
A Springtown High School graduate, Long has lived in Parker County all her life but for the last five years is one of the only people in the area licensed to rehabilitate fawns through Texas Parks and Wildlife. Long said fawns present many unique difficulties for wildlife rehabbers compared to smaller animals, so there are often fewer folks that can commit to the challenge.
“Fawns, there’s a lot of detail to them, there’s a lot of expense,” Long said. “They’re a bigger animal, so it takes a lot more … There’s not anybody in Parker County that does as many as I do. I do quite a lot.”
Long has owned and raised horses all her life and is an avid animal lover, also rescuing tropical birds, doves and occasionally rehabbing other wildlife. Long went viral online in 2022, when a rehabbed raccoon named Jasper became good friends with a fawn named Hope.
She is active on Instagram and Facebook and as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Texas Fawn and Friends is made possible through public donations. Long also has an Amazon wish list set up for regularly needed supplies. To help pay the bills, Carrie Long and her husband, Wayland, also own a truck conversion business. The end goal of the program is to get the deer healthy enough that they can be released back into the wild.
At 58, Long recently became a grandmother, and shows no signs of slowing down. Working for the most part by herself, caring for 36 young deer is a full-time job.
“It’s a lot of work but it’s rewarding,” Long said. “I love fawns, little Bambi, how could you not? They’re very easy to imprint and they’re very easy to love on for sure. So, all these guys will stay with me until December or January and then I release them. Some will survive, some won’t, that’s just part of Mother Nature. We give them the opportunity to survive. I have the ability and maybe the knowledge. I get to meet some very awesome people, too, they’re very caring.”
Fawns have sensitive stomachs and feeding them anything other than deer’s milk can result in death. For the first 10 weeks of their life, they require milk every four to six hours, A fawn that doesn’t eat can go downhill fast and a fawn that drinks anything other than deer’s milk is unlikely to last long. After reaching out to a qualified rehabber, the next two important steps she gives are to try and keep the deer in a warm, quiet space and never to feed it.
“Many people think they can just go to tractor supply and buy powdered milk, and everything will be fine,” Long said. “It would be like giving a human newborn a coke.”
Long said there are several tell-tale signs that a fawn may need the assistance of a rehabber. When a fawn is injured, bleeding, has flies on it, has visible broken bones, discharge coming from the nose, or is crying out, it needs immediate help. When encountering a baby deer that exhibits any of these signs, Long said the best thing, and the first thing, a person should do is to contact a certified rehabber like herself. Getting the fawn the professional care it needs as quickly as possible is the best way to ensure its survival and recovery.
“I would encourage everyone to be aware of their surroundings,” Long said. “They didn’t move into our environment, we moved into theirs. When in doubt, make a phone call. Everybody’s got a cell phone, use it. Instead of hitting a fawn and keeping it in the house three or four days and then bringing it to me and going, ‘oh, it’s not eating.’”
One of the most common questions Long said she gets asked is about the risk of catching diseases when handling wild deer. While deer don’t pose a direct danger in transferring diseases to humans, they do carry ticks and other parasites that can. Also, while fawns look small and cute, Long said many don’t expect the damage they can deal with their kicks and hooves.
“Their little feet will slice you in half,” Long said. “By the end of the season my wardrobe changes because, as they get older, I’ll get some that’ll just slice me in half.”
While city councils in Azle and other suburban Texas communities debate solutions to deer overpopulation, Long said she has lately not only seen more displaced fawns but more health problems as well. The cause, she assumed, is inbreeding in the quickly growing suburbs of Willow Park and Hudson Oaks. According to Long, a big part of the problem lies in human encroachment.
“You find fawns that are not healthy. They’re blind, they’re deaf, they’re lighter colored,” Long said. “One of the newest fawns I got before this morning, a lady around the corner was very upset because it was in her yard. Her house has been there less than a year. I said, ‘you realize that was a pasture before it was your house?’ Mamas always have their babies in the same spot, just as we as women always go to the same doctor … I didn’t have any idea when I started this that I’d get the volume that I’d get, but for the most part at least it’s several hours a day that’s what I do.”
Immediately after receiving the rescued fawn named Frog, Long determined he was dehydrated through a small bend at the tip of his ear. She then used an intravenous drip to rehydrate the fawn. His head was then marked with a pink splotch of paint to differentiate him from the other deer in their shared baby crib. Long remarked that this year most of the fawns she’s collected have been bucks, while last year, it was mostly does. Now in her care, Long said Frog has a good chance at surviving to adulthood. To find out more about fawn rehabilitation, donate, contact Long or view photos of rescued fawns go to www.texasfawn.com or linktr.ee/texasfawn.
“I feel like if we don’t take care of our wildlife, we’re going to look up and they’re going to be extinct,” Long said. “We all live here, we all got to get along. and we need to respect our wildlife.”
