Doe Killed, Fawn Born

    If not every cloud has a silver lining, some do, as was dramatically proved last Thursday morning when Deidre Quinn, a Montauk landscaper, drove west through Hither Woods.

    That day the cloud took the form of the gruesome aftermath of a collision between a deer and a car driven at high speed. “It must have happened just a few seconds before,” Ms. Quinn said, going on to describe how a driver who had witnessed the crash told her later that she’d seen something fly through the air when the deer was hit.

    “People were driving around it. As I came up to where the deer was, it was clearly dead, split down the middle. I looked down and saw a long thing in the road,” Ms. Quinn said. She realized later it must have been the placenta. “Then a dark thing. It moved.”

    It was a fawn, alive, covered with amniotic fluid, forced from the mother’s body by the impact. The landscaper was surprised but perhaps less disturbed than most would have been. She had seen, and helped, a number of horses and lambs give birth during her years working at Deep Hollow Ranch in Montauk.

    She got out of her car, toweled the fawn dry, put him in her lap, and drove to the Veterinary Clinic of East Hampton at Goodfriend Park. Kira, her border collie, sat beside them on the driver’s seat. “Kira was fine,” Ms. Quinn said.

    Ms. Quinn said the fawn, a male, nuzzled his head under her arm looking for his mother for a drink. “He cried, and squirmed. He was warm, and moved his legs, I could tell he was okay.”

    The fawn got the once-over at the vet and was then taken to the Wildlife Rescue Center of the Hamptons in Hampton Bays, where as of Tuesday he was being bottle fed along with another newborn and doing fine.

    Because it is being raised by hand, the deer might not be released in Montauk, but will find a new home in the rescue center’s hundreds of acres. Dee Quinn said she planned to visit the fawn in the near future.