Here’s a column I wrote about a year ago that ran in The Hour (Norwalk, Ct.) and The Keene Sentinel (Keene, N.H). It is about finding baby deer that are “abandoned” — but not really abandoned, of course. Since it is that time of year again when people may stumble across baby animals, I figured I’d put this column out there again.

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Photo by Chris Bosak
A fawn hides in the woods, June 2013.

What do old tennis balls, my boys’ penchant for baseball, and a nearby school have to do with this nature column?

Hang in there, you’ll find out soon enough.

First, let’s back up to winter. During snowless winter days I like to wander around the woods surrounding tennis courts and collect as many old tennis balls as I can. My boys used to love to join me in this endeavor. Now they kind of just tolerate the venture.

So why would I spend time and put up with the invariable scratches that come with such an outing? To have plenty of fodder for batting practice in the backyard. I live next to a school and the property is divided by a chain link fence about eight feet high. It makes for the perfect home run derby fence. I don’t have the bank account to fix all the broken windows that using a real baseball would cause, so we use old tennis balls.

The boys are getting bigger and stronger so lots of tennis balls go flying over the fence. Sometimes four or five pitches in a row are lost in the small p Continue reading →