This is a winter heartwarmer: two female deer rescued by kindly souls using ropes and a Hovercraft. They had fallen on an icy lake and couldn’t get up.
Shot 100% on the HD HERO3® camera from http://GoPro.com.
James saw a Facebook post about some deer stuck out on the ice in the middle of Albert Lea Lake, so he called up his dad and they broke out the hovercraft. It’s a father son rescue mission unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
I can’t quite figure out how these deer managed to get all the way out into the middle of the lake before they became croppers. Poor silly things.
Nice to see a bit of humanity at its best.
I’m wondering if the ice had frost on top then it melted causing a slipperier surface.
Hmmm.
Okay. Maybe.
But “Deer Blowers” might still be a good idea. You wouldn’t even need a Hovercraft.
Deer Blowers would be great. 😉
One of my first thoughts upon reading your comment was of
Racetrack Playa, might give you additional inspiration while you are in the invention lab.
“Nice to see a bit of humanity at its best.”
Yes…wouldn’t it be nice if humanity used its intelligence to make life better for all creatures of the earth?
Ah. Fiction.
Sorry, but my morning session in the gym was accompanied by podcasts on several of humanity’s most important tools – handaxes, their history and manufacture. I was thinking about the deer in a completely different but still thoroughly human manner.
If I had to guess, I’d say the deer walked out there quite normally, decided to lie down for a rest, and found they couldn’t stand up again. It certainly looks like they need a good bit of friction whenever I see them standing up from a lying position.
Those gangly legs aren’t much use on ice. No one seems to know how they manage to get as far as they do. Maybe they have the strength for a while but then after several falls can’t manage to get up again.
Hey, maybe it’s the wind! I’m enjoying the image of the deer being blown across the ice like so many fallen leaves. Every winter, same thing. Frozen ponds filled with deer zipping around and around at high speed, like ice skaters.
Oh man! You’d have to get “deer blowers” to remove them.
LOL!
Now I must go to my invention lab!
That’s how the legend of Santa and his flying reindeer got started.
My bet (and it is only a bet – we don’t get enough frozen lakes here to experiment) focusses on two things : around the edges of lakes you’ll get an accumulation of shards of ice from previous partial freezings, so the ice will be thicker there. Also, ice will form quicker / more often over shallow water, again leading to more and thicker ice around the edges of the lake. And thirdly, around the edges, the ice will incorporate pond plants, reeds, etc, making it into a composite material which will be considerably tougher than the clean ice out in the middle.
All factors that conspire to lure silly mammals out into the middle of the lake.
I gather that it’s not unknown for humans to kill themselves this way too.
I remember getting caught in quick sand once – and getting out of it by following the standard sedimentologist’s advice to spread my weight as widely as possible. The same works on crusted snow. I’d apply the same logic to ice, if I were ever to find myself in the situation.
Interesting. When one of the men is trying to put the rope on the deer’s legs and it’s struggling, the other one says “It’s not going to bite you — it knows you’re here to help.”
I doubt that. A dog, cat, or other highly intelligent pet (parrot?) who is used to human contact and being fed may “know” the human is there to help, but why would a deer assume a classified predator-type is not going to drag off an easy lunch?
Even after being released, the deer are probably only confused. The likelihood that they have formed some sort of internal narrative or memory of “nice people brought me home and made me safe!” is I suspect slim to none.
But I know little of animals from a scientific perspective. I just know enough to be cautious of my own desire to anthropomorphise.
Yeah, I was trying to imagine what the deer thought. Maybe they thought they were being dragged somewhere to be eaten up but managed to get away.
Poor deer doing the double splits:-)
Here is video of a News Helicopter blowing a deer off of a frozen lake: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7iul2vENIA
I’ve heard of this several time before.
The things I learn here!
Nice vid.
Damn I shouldve filled for a patent.
Those deer could’ve fed a *lot* of bacteria!
And, for any botanists in the audience, rescuing deer is about like giving a helping hand to the plague…
Support native plants–shoot a deer! (Or reintroduce wolves, but one must occasionally limit one’s dreams to what is possible.)
What was that coke-dream that got repeated in my hearing recently? “Be realistic. Demand the impossible!”
Actually, I know people who’ve been proposing re-introducing the wolf to Scotland for decades. The main aim being to control the red, white and hornéd plagues (deer, sheep, goats), but with a minor benefit of scaring a lot of people off the hills too.
Now that beavers seem to have been successfully re-introduced (officially and unofficially), the wolves are sniffing around, trying to get onto the serious agenda. I’d support the notion.
It is not appropriate to say, on a post like this, that you wish the animals had been killed rather than saved.
Do you even have a conception of what I mean here?
Please save your deer-killing soapbox for another post.
I take it that in this context “inappropriate” means “expressing an emotional reaction that conflicts with yours”. Yes, I was aware that my comment expressed a reaction to this event that differed from yours in a way that could cause offense.
However, deer overpopulation is a severe ecological problem in the eastern U.S. Actions that favor deer overpopulation are harmful. Although letting these deer die would conflict with our general tendency to identify with and have warm fuzzy feelings towards large mammals and other endotherms, it would also have been a better outcome for living organisms as a whole in the area. Conservation is easy when what’s good for particular endotherms to which we have an emotional attachment also happens to be good for the ecosystem as a whole and the thousands of other species that call it home. Unfortunately, this tends not to be the case. Very often our emotional bias in favor of endotherms leads us to inadvertently cause harm or, at least, to turn a blind eye to problems we create. With that in mind, I do not consider it inappropriate for me to make a comment intended to undermine that narrow and biased view of the world… although of course I probably could have done a better job of it in a number of ways.
As an example of what I’m talking about:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320714000202
Under the ESA, “Plants have the most species listed and receive the lowest per-species funding.” Why? Near as I can tell, because we find helping charismatic megafauna emotionally appealing. Rescuing a couple of deer off the ice is heartwarming. The plight of plants and other organisms harmed by deer overpopulation isn’t. I don’t think we can address this problem in a way that plays nicely with our emotional biases.
Okay, that’s enough. You’ve had your say about wishing that we could kill more deer on a thread that was designed to show man’s humanity to deer. Satisfied? I presume you wish that they had left the deer to suffer and die on the ice.
“Satisfied?”
Yes. Thank you.
So you’re wishing they had been left to die?
There is a 700 page book, with 450 pictures called ‘On a Cushion of Air’, (www.Amazon.com or http://www.thebookdepository.com and Kindle), which tells the story of Christopher Cockerell’s discovery that heavy weights could be supported on a cushion of low pressure air, and the development of the hovercraft by those who were there, from the very early days through to the heyday of the giant 165-ton SRN.4, which crossed the English Channel starting in 1968 carrying 30 cars and 254 passengers at speeds in excess of 75 knots on a calm day. It was subsequently widened to carry 36 cars and 280 passengers with an A.U.W. of 200 tones and was later lengthened to an A.U.W of 325 tons and capable of carrying 55 cars and 424 passengers. The amazing point was that from 165 tons to 325 tons only 400 extra hp was required, although a bit of speed was sacrificed, proving conclusively that Christopher Cockerell’s theory was sound.
Sadly, for economic reasons, the service came to an end on 1st October 2000. In total 6 SR.4s were built and the two remaining ones are in the Hovercraft Museum at Lee-on-Solent. See http://www.onacushionofair.com
I have used that hovercraft ferry several times. it was quite amazing, especially at low tide when it crossed the Goodwin Sands between old shipwrecks. As well as the quick crossing, turnaround time was brief. The craft had a drive-through configuration, which meant that loading and unloading the cars took only a few minutes. On one occasion I was on the road in Calais only two hours and five minutes after leaving my (then) home in Maidstone. If I had not been over-cautious about potential traffic problems on my way to the ferry terminal, it would have been even quicker.
No sign of any eels.