It is just after sunrise on the edge of a recent logging area as a doe has her spotted twin fawns out and about. Two things struck me as ironical about this family, one was how big the doe was, much larger and probably older than most does I have seen and the other was how small the fawns were for the first week in August. Some leaves had already turned color, some had even dropped while the grasses had taken on their autumn, yellow-ochre hue. I thought the fawns should’ve been much larger by this time of the late summer, if facing natural predators like numerous black bears and wolves in the area weren’t enough the upcoming and sometimes brutal winter is another factor to consider. Larger deer tend to survive the winter more successfully than smaller ones. I then wondered if an older, larger doe as herself possibly had a later conception giving way to a later birth which may have allowed the fawns a shorter time to get larger.
