Yesterday, I was behind the camera in a grassy embankment on Great Cove. I was completely concentrated on an incoming, but dithering, Loon that I wanted to swim 50 feet closer – a “come on-come-come on-come on” moment. Out of the corner of my left eye, I glimpsed a strangely-shaped shadow move and then stop – a big enough and near enough shadow to give me the involuntary creeps. I slowly swung the lens around. It was a yearling White-Tailed Doe.
She was partly up the bank, “hiding” behind some branches, but watching me at full alert. She apparently couldn’t figure out what she was looking at: a hunched-up shape over a monopod-mounted, long-lensed thing that “Clicked” every now and then. Neither one of us moved for the minute-long staring contest. She finally backed down to the beach and turned toward me for an unobstructed look. “Click.”
She then realized what she was looking at and was gone. So was the Loon. However, maybe the yearling now realizes that curiosity is not a healthy habit for a deer. (Brooklin, Maine)