Did it Again

Well, I did it again. Along a stream in the Big Woods I was kneeling down photographing the bud of a round-lobed hepatica ...

... when I got a whiff of something dead. There was a gentle downstream breeze which made it pretty obvious that the deceased was somewhere upstream. So it was upstream that I went and the scent increased. A bloodhound I am not, so whatever was dead couldn't have been very far away – and it wasn’t.

What it was was a small doe that had died a while before, perhaps a couple of weeks or a bit longer. So I did it again: found another dead deer worthy of a camera trap.

It was mid-April, a long time after the end of hunting season, why had she died when she did? The doe had died near a stream, typical of an animal that has an abdominal wound, or perhaps she'd slipped on ice and broken a leg, or starved – as did this small doe in 1974 –

Because this doe’s body had been partially eaten and dragged about 100 feet from where she died – and stank to high heaven – I didn’t look into the cause. What I did was come back with a camera trap the next morning. Fifteen days later I checked the camera – here are the videos –

Because there wasn’t much left to to attract large scavengers and the parts and pieces were scattered, it was time to remove the camera.

We’ll never know why she died, but the young doe has fed other critters and what’s left of her will continue to feed insects and bacteria, porcupines and squirrels will gnaw her bones, turkeys and other birds will eat the insects that devour the scraps. In a few months there will be no visible remnants.