Hi, Mr. Nature here. I didn’t see the deer today when I went out to look for them. That’s not unusual. Sometimes you see them, sometimes you don’t.
What is unusual is the whole idea of rather large animals so successfully concealing themselves in rather small spaces. This is the suburbs, where I live. The few remaining woodsy patches are very small indeed. So how do they do it? How do deer make themselves, for all practical purposes, invisible?
It’s simple, really. For one thing, deer excel at staying perfectly still. If they’re doing this even in a little bit of underbrush, it makes them very hard to see.
For another, their color blends in with the leaf-litter on the ground. And finally, they are experts at picking out the best hiding-places, and they’ll move around from one to another. Where they hide today is probably not going to be where they hide tomorrow.
And they don’t need much. Just little patches of cover. There might be three deer hanging out in your suburban back yard and you’d never know it.
How God provides for them, under what seem like such adverse conditions, is truly wonderful.
I assume their numbers decrease as their patches of land get smaller…
They can come back in a hurry, though–if given the chance.
“Food” for thought – venison. I was wondering if there is deer hunting nearby, if the herd is too small to permit it, if the land is too small…
I don’t think you can have hunters discharging rifles in built-up suburban neighborhoods. Deer hunting is legal in this county, wherever there’s no danger of plugging someone has he sits reading the funnies in his living room–but I don’t know where you’d go to hunt, around here.