So What Happens with All the Fawns?

By Pamela Hartmann

Fawn Using the Food Bin to Nap. Photo by TerryAnn Willingham

TerryAnn Willingham has precious little time for a phone interview. It is baby season, and she has eleven fawns to care for this year—six more than last year. At the height of the season, until these baby deer are four weeks old, she feeds them four times a day, from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.

Willingham has a streamlined routine. She has a system. Each fawn has an ID ear tag or a bit of paint on one ear: left for female, right for male, with a color corresponding to the cap on the bottle designated for that specific deer. She can handle two fawns at a time in the feeding stall within the barn. When these two are finished, they go into the post-feeding stall. "Even the fawns know the routine," she says. Usually, a bottle is downed in 30 seconds—"easy peasy," as she puts it. But this year, only about half of the fawns seem to be on board with this schedule. Some finish a portion of their bottle and come back later for more. Others beg for more than a bottle. Willingham has to take careful notes on who has gotten what.

This recordkeeping, together with the preparation of the formula, the cleaning of the bottles, and the actual feeding, can take up to eight hours each day.

Fawns are not the only animals that TerryAnn Willingham and husband Ken Willingham care for on their 40-acre ranch in Pozo. "There was really no plan," she says, about the time they retired and moved to the ranch 24 years ago. "People tend to give us stuff," she says. By stuff, she means "critters." They acquired dogs, cats, birds, and llamas. For a while, they boarded alpacas for a fellow who "skipped town" and left them in the lurch with fifteen or so. Now they are "down to" three llamas, two very old horses, one zebra, one African sulcata tortoise (150 pounds +/-), three  cockatiels, two emus, three dozen peafowl, fish (in the pond in the back), and — of course — dogs, cats, and chickens. It's "the least number of animals" that they have ever had. In the months with no fawns, they have "a pretty good routine" to care for  these creatures: an hour in the morning and an hour at night. Easy-peasy.

Willingham is a veterinary technician—one of the first 100 vet techs to be registered in California in 1975, when formal licenses were first issued. At that time, the title was "animal health technician." Willingham would prefer the title registered veterinary nurse, since, as she explains, she does everything that registered nurses do, only for non-human animals. But she has no control over choice of title.

For many years, both Willinghams worked at San Diego Zoo. For about twelve of those years, TerryAnn worked at the zoo hospital. In addition to animals brought to the hospital for all the usual reasons, such as surgery, "pretty much everything that came into the zoo had to [first] go through quarantine" in this hospital, except for elephants and rhinos, because of their size. There, she had the privilege of working with many species that most people "don't get close and personal to," an experience she calls "fabulous." This was fitting preparation for the work she does now, in "retirement" on the Pozo ranch.

The fawns entered her life in 2010, when she was contacted by Kelly Vandenheuval. (See "Birds of Prey, Part 2: A Drama of Surrogacy," in the June issue of SLO Coast Journal.) Pacific Wildlife Care needed a home rehabilitator for fawns, which require more time and space than is possible at the Morro Bay Rehabilitation Center. Today, most of the fawns come to Willingham from PWC. Some come from the Department of Fish and Wildlife. Some come from people who contact her directly. So far this year, she has talked at least a dozen people out of "rescuing" a  fawn that didn't need to be rescued.

A truly orphaned fawn needs human intervention if it is to survive. Clearly, a fawn found near its dead mother, a victim of a collision with a car, is an orphan. A similar situation occurred this season. A man saw twin fawns born on his property. The mother was not doing well after giving birth, and one twin soon died. With the mother near death herself, the other baby would soon be orphaned and far too young to care for itself. The man brought the fawn to Willingham. It became one of her eleven. This was a rescue.

But a distinction must be made between rescuing and kidnapping. When pressed to give a percentage of how many fawns are actually in need of rescue each year, Willingham pauses. It's different each season, she says. "Stupidity varies from year to year." Her choice of word might seem strong, but she has reason: this year, about one-quarter of the fawns should never have been brought in from the wild.

One fawn was with her mother on a country road by Lake Nacimiento. A woman driving down this road chose to chase them instead of waiting the brief time it would have taken for them to wander off into the brush. Doe and fawn, frightened, became separated. Somehow, another driver then became involved. The fawn, panicked, jumped off the road, into a gully and into a fence, where she injured her head. The second driver picked up the fawn — not orphaned but separated and injured — and brought the baby to Willingham. Until the first driver used poor judgment, doe and fawn had been in no need of rescue.

In another case of human interference, a divorced man had his kids for the weekend. He took them out hiking, and they came across a fawn. But instead of walking on and not disturbing the baby, whose mother was probably out foraging, as is natural, he took the fawn home as a playmate for his children. (What was he thinking? "Who knows what he fed it?" Willingham wonders, in frustration.) At the end of the weekend, he brought the children back to his ex-wife. He also brought the fawn. Horrified, the woman called PWC, which then contacted Willingham. This, she points out, was a clear case of kidnapping.

On the ranch in Pozo, the fawns are growing. Between four and eight weeks, they are down to three bottle feedings a day instead of four because they are now beginning to forage for whatever is growing in their catch-pen. When they get older, Willingham will move them to a pasture of several acres, with more to forage on.

In caring for the fawns, she knows these are wild animals that imprint easily on humans. For this reason, she keeps to a set of self-imposed guidelines: "Don't encourage them to be overly-friendly. Don't try to make pets" out of them. "Don't talk to them and baby them. Don't want to be their playmate. Just provide nourishment and antibiotics, if necessary."

However, there is one deer for whom she allows herself a special fondness, a female from 2010, the first year that Willingham took in fawns. At the end of that season, this doe (#110 yellow) was not accepted into the nearby herd. She came back to roam the forty acres on the ranch, and each spring since then, she has returned to give birth in the front pasture. She and her own fawn remain close by for a while, a welcome addition to the group, as she seems to "help out" by presenting a model to the fawns: this is what you will grow up to be. A few of the more aggressive fawns have even managed to nurse from her. This year, for no reason that Willingham can figure, she took her own fawn off and brought it back several weeks later, "wild as a March hare."

Soon, these fawns will be grown, old enough to forage for themselves and roam beyond the ranch. Their future is uncertain. Last year was "a devastating year," Willingham says. "We lost virtually all our fawns" to cougars. "In a drought, everybody needs to eat."

The hope is that #110 yellow might somehow help out, provide guidance, form a new herd. But this is not something over which Willingham has control, any more than she has control over drought or cougars or humans who bring her fawns that would be far better off left with their mothers in the wild.

She does all she can to foster the orphans and to educate people about when to and not to intervene in nature. She reminds us that fawns imprint easily, so we should keep our distance. They must remain wild. Losing their fear of humans puts them in great danger. She also tells us not to think that a baby has been orphaned if it is curled up, alone, in the forest or a field. The doe leaves the fawn in a nest far away from the herd so "the baby doesn't get stepped on." She then goes off foraging but will return to nurse. Mostly, Willingham tells us, we should "stay far away so the
 mom doesn't feel threatened." Our presence can frighten her away from her own.

TerryAnn Willingham must end this phone conversation. It is time to feed the eleven fawns. Next year, maybe people will bring her only true orphans and no kidnapped babies. Next year, maybe more fawns will remain with their mothers, in the wild, and Willingham will have fewer to care for. Easy-peasy.

 For more information on Pacific Wildlife Care, a 501 (c)3 non-profit organization,
or to volunteer or make a donation, go to the website: Pacific Wildlife Care

If you find an injured wild animal, call the PWC Hotline (805-543-9453).