ypsi~dixit

that last photo especially reminded me of the vonnegut story "Deer in the Works", as the caption seems to suggest glorious freedom for the animal, while you can clearly see (and insinuate from the presence of the swimming pool) that she's now "Free" in the middle of a massive artificial housing development, not exactly a deer's natural environment.

Yes, the poor thing is probably scared out of her wits and trying to find some refuge in the suburban maze.

I'd like to know how she got through that fence, whose bard looked about 8 inches apart.

This is pretty near where I grew up. When they tore down the woods at the back of our subdivision to build some fancy new houses, the deer were displaced. A doe got lost in the subdivision, freaked out, and ran headfirst into a fence post. She was writhing on our neighbor's driveway. The cops were called and insisted our hunter neighbors shouldn't deal with it. They came and shot the poor thing through the snout, not fully grasping deer anatomy. The local kids had to point out where they should shoot it to hit the heart. The cops were more shaken up by it than the neighborhood kids. We just wanted her to stop suffering...

The hunter neighbors would have done a better job of killing her mercifully by shooting her in a kill zone, It seems odd that any Michigander, hunter or no, would not know it shoot it in the heart.

It's a sad story, though, about the disappearance of the woods causing the flight (not unlike the Ypsi Twp coyotes).

This happens all the time in the edge suburbs, as we displace semi-wild habitat with mowed lawns. Growing up in a second ring Detroit suburb has made me into an anti-sprawl advocate.