House Deer?

 In late December, we started noticing deer up around the house from time to time.  We've always known they're out there, eating the garden, cleaning up dropped fruit in the orchard, traipsing through the side yard.  And having fawns in the pasture.

But typically they aren't found bedding down right near to the house like this one I spied as I was turning the living room lights out shortly after midnight on January 1st.

All of January, we spotted deer in or near the yard pretty much daily.  They would dig in the snow looking for grass underneath to eat.  They would bed down in the snow; sometimes in the open, sometimes under trees, sometimes right next to the house.

there were deer here in the night

front yard deer in the morning

front yard deer (bedded next to trees) in the evening

Yarn Thief looking intently at deer bedded outside the living room again

said deer, fluffed and frosty in the cold

deer digging in a flower bed next to the house

deer by the little log cabin (that we need to restore for the grandkids) in the side yard

deer in the back yard

They even left prints almost nightly in the new snow on the sidewalks and right behind our truck on the pad in front of the garage.  One morning, while going out to feed horses, I spooked a deer that had been hanging out down on our patio!  

Now, it has undoubtedly become a hard winter for them.  We don't usually have snow on the ground for weeks and weeks straight, let alone the string of below zero temperatures we had in January.  They are up in the yard, practically touching the house, looking for food and shelter.  The fir, pine and spruce trees we have on the perimeters of the yard are great for laying under.  The tips of those tree branches are tender enough to eat.  So is the arborvitae that is in the flower bed in front of the garage--they have denuded that poor arborvitae from ground to about five feet high.  

DH took mercy on them a week or so ago and plowed a path around the front, side, and back yards with the tractor in order to expose grass for them to eat so they wouldn't have to dig through the snow so much to find food. 

grazing the exposed grass

They really appreciated that, telling their friends.  For a few days, until the next 2-3" snowfall that covered the plowed area, we had not the 2-4 deer we had grown used to seeing, but 7 or 8 deer every time we looked outside.

DH and I have jokingly started calling them our house deer as they are getting used to us coming and going from the house and spook away less and less.  A lot of the time now they stand in the yard and watch us going about our work of feeding and turning out/bringing in horses, tending chickens, stoking the fire, shoveling snow.  We're not scary monsters, but weird beings to study.

This, however is not good.  Not good for deer to get too tame, too used to humans.  It's also not good for my garden, my flower beds, my fruit trees, my poor arborvitae that might have to be cut down later this year if it doesn't recover from being sheared by deer.  We're going to have to become scary again once the weather breaks.  Can't have deer eating all the landscaping or decimating the vegetables in the garden come summer.