by Jo Schaper
According to the Wildlife Code, it’s illegal to shoot deer from the road.

Jo Schaper photo

Lucky for Eugene and me, that admonition does not include a Canon G9 with a 2-gigabyte card. Saturday November 28, with admirably crisp late fall weather, we went to Salem on business, and unwilling to waste the day, stopped by Maramec Spring Park on the way back.

We figured it was our lucky day when we found out the usual $4 admission (which we pay gladly for this magnificent private park) had been waived for the holiday. We pulled around the entrance building, intending to make a pit stop, and there, about 200 feet between us and Highway 8 were a small herd of antlerless deer.
I grabbed for the camera in the back seat. “I want to take some pictures of the deer,” I said.

Jo Schaper photo

You have to realize, with a husband who is a perfectionist photographer, these are almost fighting words. Currently, I have a decent digital camera. He’s caught between the demise of Kodachrome and the still too-high cost of a complete digital SLR kit. He’d rather have no camera than anything less than the best.

The fact of the matter is: he takes better critter pictures than I do. But I held my ground. I got out of the car, and advanced on the deer, wind blowing in my face. I knew they could see me, but likely not smell me. And the traffic on Hwy. 8 didn’t seem to faze them a bit. Thirty five pictures later, I came back to the car, being too timid to go more than about 150 feet from the nearest deer.

Eugene Vale photo

Eugene looked at me with his anticipatory, puppy-dog-begging face. “Can I try?” he asked.

“Oh, ok, go ahead,” I said. He took the camera from my hands, and fiddled a bit. He’s never happy unless he’s shooting full manual, even with a camera with more electronics and memory than Apollo 11 had on board. Then he advanced on the deer.

Eugene Vale photo

Moving from tree to tree, he managed to get about 75 feet away. Several times they startled — better picture when the deer is head up, staring straight at you, wondering about your intentions, of course. At one point, the whole herd ran up the hill side, where they virtually disappeared between the leaf litter and bare branches. But they came back down shortly– the attraction of green grass was just too much.

Jo Schaper photo

Even the most placid deer have some limits. When gawkers drove by, parking on the exit road downwind of the deer they fled for good. This was after another thirty five pictures on the card. We called it a day, and headed for our original destination: the spring.

But the deer were not done with us. When we exited the park about four p.m., they were back. The lighting was a little better, and instead of the eight deer we saw earlier there were now 13. Twenty seven pictures later, we decided that if we couldn’t find a good picture or two out of the literally 97 we had taken between us — well, the photo gods just weren’t on our side.

Jo Schaper Photo

Anybody need a picture of a Bambi rat?