Rescue gives deer a leg up in life
Published: September 21, 2006
Heidi Knickerbocker thought she had spied a white rabbit under a bush on her way back to her car after a walk on the Delphian School campus in Sheridan.
When she parted the branches, Knickerbocker instead found a tiny white deer.
“All four of his legs were horribly bent,” she said about first seeing the animal in early summer. “He couldn’t really walk. He could hobble a little bit. We knew there was no way he would even survive the night.”
Knickerbocker put the small animal in her minivan and drove to Salem’s Turtle Ridge Wildlife Center. Her black pit bull gave the deer reassuring licks during the drive, Knickerbocker said.
“We didn’t even know if he was going to survive,” said Knickerbocker, 32. “He seemed dehydrated and miserable.”
At Turtle Ridge, volunteers made braces to correct the deer’s bent legs. They massaged his tendons and muscles to ease his pain and help him learn to move them.
“I thought he was never going to walk,” said Darcy Toronto, a rehabilitator with the center.
Staff members wondered if he was a cross between a deer and a goat because of his unusual coloring, called “piebald” — white fur with patches of brown and black, the opposite coloring of a typical fawn. Biologists told them a deer-goat mix wasn’t possible.
Volunteers named him “Gabe” because one of the volunteers said this animal needed an angel like Gabriel to look after him.
At the center, Gabe has bonded with three other baby deer who are recovering from injuries; one of them was hit by a car. But Gabe’s legs are shorter than those of his new friends, so he has trouble keeping up.
“Unless somebody finds these animals, they are going to die because they can’t follow the mother,” said Mary Bliss of Turtle Ridge Wildlife Center. “He can’t even keep up with these other deer.”
So even though Gabe is running, playing and grazing like his deer companions, he never will be released from the care of the wildlife volunteers. He wouldn’t survive on his own, Bliss said.
Now, with new extended family — volunteers and other wildlife roaming Turtle Ridge — Gabe doesn’t seem to mind his new home.
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