Last summer, I wrote about the deer eating our decorative pond plants along the banks of our pond.
Caught in the act
The deer waded out and snipped off every leaf of our Purple Pickerel right at the water line and left the leaf stalk floating. It completely killed the beautiful plants that had flourished there for the last 5 years.
We were pleased that a few stray volunteers had established themselves on the edge of our island. They looked very pretty there this spring, the purple spikes contrasting with the burnt orange of the daylilies. We knew that they would be safe from the marauding deer since they were, after all, on the island.
A couple of days ago, we noticed one patch of the pickerels cut and floating on the water. We repositioned the game camera to catch the culprit.
As you can see from this series of photos, the deer climbs down the bank, swims over to the island, climbs out of the water, and heads over to the over side of the island to chomp off the remaining leaves.
Caught on Camera
Anybody looking?
Holding my nose… Here I go.
Doing the deer paddle
Now I’ll just climb up the bank…..
Nothing like dinner on the island.
What is so perplexing is that the deer doesn’t seem to be eating the leaves. She just nips them off at the base and leaves the mess for us to clean up.
We launched the garbage scow, our little paddle wheeler, and peddled over to the island with a pond rake and gathered up the wreckage. Go figure!
