It's Baby Season

Baby season is a beautiful season, one that demands both aww and caution. Baby animals are precious, beautiful, and innocent. While incredible to watch and photograph, mothers will be mothers and should be. While gentle and loving to their newborns, they will protect their babies against any perceived threat.

Around Estes Park and RMNP, those mothers are often of the deer family. Mule deer, elk cows, and mother moose. We see them around Lake Estes, at Bond Park, and in our own backyards. They wander from the wild willows in the national park and bed down in the brush where we may be hiking along trails into the wilderness.

When we startle them, they will protect their child. I’ve seen it in our local stories of kids on bikes being chased, and seen it in my own neighborhood when I walk our dogs, a perceived threat to newborns. Mothers will approach, threatening us with their presence, demanding that we turn and go back where we came from, away from their defenseless newborns.

We know better than to be tourists capturing a cell phone video, stumbling and falling as they run from a mother elk whose space they have invaded. It is a threat we have learned to avoid for the good of the animals and our own well-being, evading such unplanned confrontations. That lets us focus again on the precious, beautiful, and innocent from a safe distance. 

Like the wobbly newborn with the will to stand on legs that have never carried weight. The precious way they fight to get their feet under them, pushing, swaying, stumbling, and maybe falling only to try again until their legs understand their function. Then they press all four hoofs into the ground, slowly straighten their legs, and look wide eyed at the world as their mother licks their fur, cleaning and warming the newborn.

There are the twin mule deer babies following mom through our neighborhood. They walk shyly, taking in their surroundings as every bit of the world is new to them. Most adoring are the big, bold, brown eyes of wonder that look at the world around them, curious and cautious. Those are the “doe eyes” so beautiful in Disney animation yet real in my own backyard. 

We see elk calves all around. Like the one born last week outside of our veterinarian’s office, the Animal Medical Center. Its mother had picked the right place. From inside the office, those dedicated to the health of animals watched protectively as the baby’s coat dried from the birthing process. In the morning sun, the calf stood under the protective eyes of her mother and the caring humans watching from inside the animal clinic.