N.S. wildlife rehabilitation centre sees influx of orphaned white-tailed deer

Hope For Wildlife is caring for 14 orphaned fawns at the rehabilitation centre.

Hope for Wildlife, a wildlife rehabilitation centre in Seaforth, N.S., has received an influx of orphaned white-tailed deer fawns recently.

Hope Swinimer, the founder and director of Hope for Wildlife, says the animals have been found from the tip of Yarmouth right through to Cape Breton.

“By far the most common reason we get white-tailed deer in at Hope for Wildlife is the mother has been hit by a car and killed and the baby’s close by. Or, as we’ll see in the next few weeks, some of the fawns will come in and they’ll be the ones who have been hit,” she told CTV Atlantic’s Valentine Nkengbeza.

Swinimer says members of the public drop off the fawns, as well as the Department of Natural Resources and her team of more than 250 volunteers.

“When the phone calls come in, I always do an assessment over the phone first before we decide whether that fawn needs rescuing or not,” she said.

Once the deer arrive, they go straight into a quarantine area. After they are cleared by a veterinarian, they can live a more natural life at the facility and roam through the grass and cuddle up under a heat lamp.

Swinimer says her team must be incredibly careful when it comes to giving them a bottle.

“We usually wear a cover and a facemask and gloves when we go in to feed the deer,” she said.

One of the recent group of fawns is named after different types of cheese – like Brie and Cheddar.

“We go in alphabetical order, depending on how they come in, so currently we’ve got up to ‘S’ – it just helps us keep track of whose who because everyone’s sort of on a different formula,” explains volunteer Rachel McGrath.

The fawns are ready to go back home to the wild once they grow a bit and start to become spooked by humans.

While most rehabilitated animals at Hope for Wildlife go back where they came from, it’s different with white-tailed deer.

“White-tailed deer are herd animals, so they need to be released as a herd,” Swinimer says.

“So that means the one from Yarmouth might be released with the one from Cape Breton and the Department of Natural Resources guides and picks the place where they should released each and every year.”

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