A White-Tailed Deer in Distress

I went out mid-morning today for a 2-hour walk along Goose Creek, about 10 miles west of us in Loudoun County, with the temperature about 10 degrees. Goose Creek is a tributary of the Potomac River. In the first half of the 1800s investors began to build a canal to run beside stretches of it as it neared the Potomac to bypass low-grade rapids in the creek. The idea was to transport flour from the many mills along Goose Creek's 50 some miles across the Potomac to the C&O Canal, then to Washington and Alexandria. As with some other canal projects of the time, the railroads put the Goose Creek Canal out of business before it could be completed and make a profit. About 1/4 mile up from the creek's entrance into the river, a walker can still see one of the sandstone locks from the 1850s, and for some way up the creek one can see the remnant of the canal itself. At any rate, I enjoyed walking about 3 miles along the creek, seeing the canal lock, and observing many birds: about 6 great blue herons; many juncos; wrens; flickers; sparrows; mallards; canvasbacks; a downy woodpecker, a tufted titmouse; a belted kingfisher. Some parts of the creek showed considerable ice; some parts ran free. The most interesting experience occurred as I was exploring around the canal lock. I heard a crashing sound in the woods behind me, and I turned to see what appeared to be a young adult white-tailed deer bolting among the trees and brush toward the creek, about 15 yards from me. The deer had small antlers. It must have walked or run through some kind of ribbons, perhaps once attached to balloons, for the ribbons seemed snagged on the deer's antlers and trailed behind as the deer ran in agitation. I walked quickly after as the deer found its way 7 to 8 feet down the steep bank to the creek. Trying to cross on the ice, the deer's hooves slipped and splayed and slid out from under it, and the deer fell heavily on its side on the ice in the middle of the creek, with the pink and blue ribbons contrasting with the white, steel, gray, and brown of the ice and the deer. Stunned, the deer lay there for a moment. Then it struggled to stand and awkwardly continued to the far bank. There it slipped again and fell through the thinner ice onto its side and into the shallow cold water edging the bank. Again, it seemed stunned, this time for about 30 seconds. Finally it struggled again to stand up out of the water and gingerly mount that bank to get away from the river and disappear into woods on the other side. This was a dramatic scene to witness. I could not help but wonder what will become of this deer, with several feet of pink and blue ribbons trailing from its head and down along its side as it negotiates the wooded and developed areas along Goose Creek and the Potomac River in eastern Loudoun County.