The Deer of Fort Snelling

By Anna Landis, Shakopee Field Crew / AmeriCorps Member

As our first week of project work comes to a close in Fort Snelling State Park, we have managed to  have such a wide array of experiences on-site, from finding an intact turtle shell in the mud or watching Delta planes come screaming into the runway at the airport, that the battle against buckthorn was all the more bearable.

Unlike a lot of the parks within the Minnesota State Parks system, Fort Snelling is smack in the center of the action in the metro, butting up against both highway 494 and the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Depending on where you go, though, it’s easy to forget you’re in such an urban area. Even in relatively busy parts of the park near the Thomas C. Savage Visitor Center, wildlife of all kinds is thriving.

Canada Geese returning north for the spring share the lakes with Wood Ducks and Mallards, Bald Eagles wheel high above the Mendota Bridge while we toiled away cutting and swamping far below it.

Our most memorable encounters, however, were with the deer. On Monday morning, our project host had mentioned that the deer in the park were very unafraid of humans, and that a dedicated group of amateur photographers that frequented the park kept tabs on the herd.

It was late that Monday morning when I first caught sight of them. Taking a breather in between swamping stands of buckthorn thicker than my arm, I spotted a doe bedded down in the clearing in front of us some two hundred yards away.

What I thought was a rare catch paled to what came later that day. Utterly unbothered by the roar of our brush saws, a gaggle of does and their yearling fawns strolled by even closer before lunch, heading for the ridge on the other side of the road. They returned again in the afternoon, seemingly curious about the newly-bald forest floor we had cleared out. As we all slowly realized they had returned, pointing them out to each other as we worked, all of us, without discussing it, collectively stopped to watch them.

By now, they were almost unbelievably close to our worksite, some barely twenty-five yards away. Exchanging awed looks, several of us pulled out our phones to try and capture the moment. Their presence alone, their willingness to be near us, seemed like a good omen to me. To be a bit of a hippie about it, it was like they might have understood what we were trying to do to help clean up their home, to do what we could to put it back to the way it was meant to be.