Loomis group rescues fawns from fires, car collisions — and misguided humans

Every mother’s goal is to prepare a child to leave home and thrive in the outside world.

Diane Nicholas of Loomis has done extraordinarily well for her brood, in this case 200 fawns she lovingly rehabilitates each year. Her mission is to simulate a doe’s nurturing, heal the fawns physically and prepare them mentally to go out and thrive.

Nicholas is a fawn rescuer. On a 5-acre plot of land next door to her home, her nonprofit organization Kindred Spirits Fawn Rescue takes in newborns all the way up to 4 or 5 months old with a goal of returning them to the wild.

“Sometimes they are hours old, often hit on a freeway,” she said.

Once, a pregnant deer was struck by a car and a man went to help. Seeing the mother would not survive, he cut open her belly and removed the fawns and drove four hours to bring them to the rescue facility.

She has taken in animals with everything from broken legs and shoulders, to injuries caused as they have fled from fires. And she sees too many cases of malnourished fawns, made so by humans trying to domesticate them.

She has asked Book of Dreams readers to help her reach her goal of $5,000 to purchase more fencing, transport carriers and aluminum roofing panels. Without it, she might have to turn some fawns away next year.

“As the numbers have grown, we’re running out of room,” she said. “We are getting toward the end in terms of numbers we can serve.”

And she has to be prepared for anything.

“When Forest Hill had a fire, a California Highway Patrol officer saw a fawn jump off a cliff trying to get away from a fire,” she said. “He landed on the road. I had to meet the officer at 3 a.m.”

All of the fawn’s hooves were burned. Under her care, the hooves grew back and he was released.

Nicholas has seen fawns get stuck on iron rail fences trying to follow their mothers over the top, fawns swimming in irrigation canals trying to find their mothers, and too many fawns removed from humans.

“We get fawns that have been invited into people’s homes, sit on their living room sofa with the dog and the family. I get them when they are about 3 or 4 months old because by then they are ripping up the house,” she said.

Domestication is extremely harmful. After the female deer gives birth, she spends the first six months leading them into secluded areas nearby, nurturing them and preparing them to cope with danger.

However, when fawns are exposed to humans, they can settle in as a pet pretty easily and can’t just be put back into the wild because they haven’t learned how to identify predators and take cover.

She pairs up every fawn who comes in with a buddy while it heals, then later exposes it to a 10-fawn herd. From this they begin re-acclimating to a community in the wild.

Human mistreatment of fawns is all too common. Nicholas recalls “two little ladies in another county who thought cherry pie would be a really good thing to feed it.”

A neighbor happened to come over and called animal control, which referred the case to her.

“Not only had it been habituated to humans, it was malnourished.”

A pair of fawns came out of a drug bust, too.

“These growers had different animals in cages,” she said. “One fawn had no undercoat because they hadn’t gotten food. The other’s hooves were curving because he was in a cage that was off the ground. They stayed with me a long time.”

While each fawn comes in with its own issues, the rehabilitation process is fairly consistent. First they are quarantined for 10 days to ensure against spreading disease.

Then, if they are newborns, they get bottles of goat milk colostrum. Soon her team will expose them to natural vegetation. They supplement that with alfalfa and vitamins.

Because it isn’t good for the fawns to have a great number of people around, Nicholas works with a small group of volunteers to get the job done. She gets a lot of interest when she holds an annual “work day” for volunteers, but they rarely come back.

Helping fawns “isn’t like hugging Bambi,” she says. “It is hard work.”

Still, when she does release a herd, “it is an emotional day for us,” she said. “We have worked with these little guys for anywhere up to six months.”

It touches her heart when they are released into wildlife preserves, even if they don’t look back to say goodbye

“…That feeling when you see them come out of the trailer is amazing. And they get it pretty fast” that the wildlife preserve is their forever home.

The request

Needed: Funds to purchase more fencing, transport carriers and aluminum roofing panels.

Cost: $5,000

This story was originally published December 21, 2019 at 5:00 AM.