Fall Afternoon On The Assabet

                              Fall Afternoon On The Assabet

I hadn't been to Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge since August. Since then, the drought ended, and all the areas and ponds that had dried up are now re-flooded. When I got out of school, I drove to pick up my camera, and then to the Refuge. Vegetation near the parking area is already turning brown, and the high bush blueberry and red maple saplings that grew all over the beaver pond were turning reddish orange...

I went to a stand of dead pines upstream, to search for the pair of ospreys that had spent the summer there. I didn't see any there, and I hadn't seen any at the nest on the light pole at feeley field. I'm assuming that means they've already started their migration to Central America. I'm actually not sure where their nest was, even though I caught them mating in what i now realize was a heron nest, back in April...

       As I walked further down "Taylor Rd", I found a great blue heron preening at the side of the pond, in the exact same spot I saw it the last two times I had visited in the past. It must be a proven fishing spot.

As I was taking photos of it, I heard a deep squawking call from behind me. A second heron flew over my head, past the first heron, and I got a flight shot right before in landed along a peninsula...

...And when I checked back on the first heron, It had vanished. Clearly it had joined the second heron on the peninsula without me noticing. I turned around after a bit, and started walking down the road in the direction of the parking lot. I still had plenty of time so I turned right, into a small clearing. A young whitetail deer was browsing only about 30 feet away. It immediately noticed me, and stopped. It was definately a fawn, judging by it's build, even though its spots have almost completely disappeared. There is a single row of light spots barely visible in the below photo, along the deer's spine. The fawn has also already lost it's reddish-orange summer coat, and is growing its dull brown winter coat. It froze for about a minute, but didn't run off...

Not wanting to miss the opportunity by spooking it, I sat for a few minutes behind a young white pine. The fawn went back to browsing. It was nibbling on the tall grass, and birch saplings mainly. Most deer would have fluffed up their white tails, and ran away by this point. This one is probably still learning how to respond to predators, and wasn't sure whether I was a threat. I was very surprised to see that the fawn was actually walking towards me...

...Now only 20 feet away, it turned parallel to me, and started wandering to my left. I took some footage using the video camera mode on my Canon Rebel T3...

    ...This is probably the same fawn I got on a trail cam in June: with its mother, just across the road from where today's sighting happened: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/123037388 

Eventually, the fawn was in the buckthorn bushes and woods edge to my left. I walked as calmly and quietly as I could down to where it had been when I found it. Oddly, I didn't find any scat, or other evidence of deer hanging out there regularly. The fawn moved on to a patch of sweet fern...

I tried my best to leave without scaring it off, but as I tried to get around it, it ran towards the woods and then stopped to look back...

...and when I continued walking towards the exit, the deer lifted its tail, bounded into the thick woods and disappeared. The deer was easily the highlight of that walk. I headed back towards the car. While at Puffer Pond (a beaver pond near the parking lot), I noticed another photographer, with a much longer lens than my Tamron 18-400. He was shooting yet another heron...

And while driving down the windy road on my way out of the Refuge, I noticed 2 wild turkeys. I stopped the car, and took a few photos out of the window.