Deer Selfie
Like most everyone else I have trail cameras set up all over my hunting spots. And like everyone else, as fall closes in, I'm paying more attention to the photos as the bucks display their final growth. Hopefully, unlike everyone else, I have one particular doe that loves the camera. I mean loves it. All the other deer waltz through the lens of the camera barely posing just browsing along on their way to important business elsewhere. She or, “Elsie”, as I've come to know her, although I think she may prefer Jasmine or Destiny, for some reason, has nothing to do all day. I'm not even sure she eats; I think she's on a diet though she doesn't need to be.
I turned the cameras off from June well into July thinking she'd move along. As you may or may not know there are limits to trail cameras. Batteries burn out, CD cards fill up, and subscriptions come with new charges when you have to buy another batch of pictures. That is usually not a problem as the batteries last long enough with enough space between “recharges” to keep up with traffic in front of a camera. This is not the case with Elsie in the neighborhood.
Of course, being a deer doe who should be named Destiny, Elsie cannot have her own cell camera so she decided to use mine. Literally, all day long she'd stand in front of the camera, looking at it while moving her pretty head from one side to the other; to the tune of one thousand pics of her in a twenty-four-hour period! I'm pretty sure if Elsie had opposable thumbs, she would take the camera down and walk around holding it in front of her discussing her new FansOnly page on Tik Toc.
She never left the viewing radius of the camera for the entire month of May and into June. In June, I took the camera down. I already had an idea of what the local bucks looked like and hoped that Elsie would get bored and find another camera in the absence of mine. In August, I put the camera back up with fresh batteries, a fresh subscription and a fresh CD card, ready to see what the final form of “my” bucks looked like as they shed their velvet.
The first twentyfour hours passed without incident and very few “dings” on my phone notifying me of a picture being taken. I started to relax. Then, in the middle of a Friday night, right after happy hour, my phone started sounding like a winning slot machine in a casino. “Oh, it's a big buck rubbing his velvet off on a nearby tree”, I thought hopefully. Checking out the photos, honestly, I think I would have preferred seeing a lumber thief cutting down my tree. Instead, there was my Elsie; left view, right view, looking up, looking down, pouting face, kissy face, lips puckered, then big smile and repeat a subscription worth of variations. I think there was some twerking starting too, when I turned the camera off.
I was not the first to join the cell camera age but I have been using cameras for a long time now, if you count since the year 2000 as a long time ago. Never have I seen a doe act like this before. I don't know what to do. I did begin the process of the obvious, old-fashioned answer and told the guys in camp to get doe tags. Deep down I know that won't solve the problem. I am pretty sure she will talk my group of softies out of it and next year, I'm going to have her and three fawns preening in front of my Moultrie sending in thousands more FansOnly fawning shots…
See you along the stream.