Fake deer or big fakers?

While driving through the woods the other day with a co-worker, we spotted this deer standing in the plantation about 200 yards from us. So, like we always do, we stopped to gawk at it and see if it had the gawker genes or runner genes in its blood. Since it is not hunting season, it is hard to tell because gawkers still just gawk and runners, knowing we cannot shoot at them legally, just stand there and pretend to be gawkers for us. Just as expected the deer just stood there and gawked. We got out the camera with the big zoom lens and the binoculars so we could gawk back. After several minutes of a world class stare off, we started to realize that this deer had not blinked, twitched, chewed, ate grass, turned its head, fipped its tail or any other thing that both gawker and runner deer are well known to regularly do. This deer did not move.

We began to wonder if this was one of those fake deer that game officers set out to catch those hunters that are so frustrated by all the runners running off out of thier sites before they can get an acurate shot off, that they start straying from the rules and guidelines for hunters set up by the agency that attempts to manage wild animal populations and start throwing lead in the direction of anything that looks like a deer, anytime of day, or night or from inside their vehicle or from a road.(there are laws about when, where and how to shoot at wild animals.) About this time, we notice a second deer doing the same thing. So we snap some pics and watch both of these deer for what seemed like an eternity, and niether one of them showed any sign that they were actually real deer. Finally, we came to the conclusion that these were in fact fake deer. There seems to be no way that even the world champion gawker deer could stand this still for this long and not at least need to scratch itself where one of its thousands of fleas and ticks is biting at it. The only thing we could do now was to walk out and get a close up picture of these two stuffed decoys.

So after watching them intently for over 10 minutes without any sign of life, I shut the truck off, we got out and started walking toward the fake herbivores. But to our supprise, once we hiked about 150 feet towards them, they both came to life and ran up and over the hill along with a third deer that had been hiding in the brush.

Then it came to me. These two gawkers were testing their gawkabilities against each other. The third one was judging to see who flinched first. Kind of a gawker deer world championships right here in our own back yard! I'm sure they got bonus points for convincing the 2 legged creatures in the noisy 4 wheel beast that they were not real. Now all we have to do is hope they continue this competition and forget about when the next hunting season starts. We just need to keep the ones with runner genes from infiltrating the area. So all the discouraged hunters out there have something to look forward to for next year. We have world champion gawker deer right here waiting to hold a pose for us come next October!