'Lot of stars had to align': Conservation officer delivers fawn with emergency C-section on Vancouver Island

When Sgt. Stuart Bates responded to a call about a deer hit by a car, the B.C. conservation officer never expected it would become a once in a career experience.

“After I put the deer out of its misery, I quickly did a check and found it was pregnant,” Stuart says.

The dying mother was in a wooded area off the road, where Stuart attempted to do what he’d never done before—save the unborn baby.

“I very quickly did a C-section,” Stuart says. “I was able to find a fawn and pull it out.”

The baby wasn’t breathing. After a call to a wildlife vet for advice, Stuart helped the deer slowly come to life.

“We didn’t give the fawn much chance of survival,” Stuart says. “The trauma of being part of a vehicle accident wouldn’t have helped it.”

But Stuart refused to give up on the fawn. He rushed the baby over to a family friend who was raising baby goats.

“He showed up in my driveway with a box [containing the fawn] in his arms,” Jocelyn Lord recalls with a smile. “[Stuart] had a really sheepish, hopeful look on his face.”

Although the deer’s chances of surviving the first 24 hours were slim, Jocelyn started tube feeding it the next best thing to its mother’s milk, goat milk.

“By day two she wanted to take the bottle,” Jocelyn says as the fawn eagerly empties the bottle.

Did you see Jocelyn said “she?” It turns out the baby’s a girl. Jocelyn’s children named her Hazel.

“She’ll romp around the living room with the kids,” Jocelyn says, before showing a video of the fawn and one of her kids chasing each other around the coffee table. “She’ll lick our faces. She follows us from room to room.”

After a week of round the clock care, Hazel is thriving. And Stuart—who’s never heard of a story like this in 16 years of conservation—can hardly believe it.

“A lot of stars had to align for this one,” Stuart says, listing how the caller had to find the injured mother, the mother had to be alive, the pregnancy had to be full-term, and Stuart had to take the chance to do the C-section.

“So it’s extremely rare this would happen.”

And now—thanks to Stuart and Jocelyn—it’s extremely likely that Hazel will move on to a deer rehabilitation centre, before embarking on a life in the wild this fall.

“It will probably never happen again in my career,” Stuart smiles. “But it happened once and that was a good day!”