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My name is Kim Cooley, and my major is captive wildlife management. Over the 2007 summer, between my freshman and sophomore years at UW-Richland, I got an internship on a white-tail ranch in Texas. My job was to bottle-raise and care for white-tail fawns. For the first week, I worked on the main ranch where the adult deer were located. To the right is a picture of me and one of about a hundred and fifty pen deer on the main ranch.
	The fawns were born on a ranch 40 miles away from the one I stayed on, and they were brought to us about 12 hours after they were born. We used individually labeled baby bottles (labeled with the fawn's ear tag number) to feed them. When I left, we were up to 150 fawns. To the left is our milk wagon. I grew up on a dairy farm raising calves. I didn't think tiny fawns would be much trouble to feed. I was surprised at how aggressive some of the fawns were. They had very sharp teeth when they are born and can easily slice open a finger.
Fawns are extremely hard to start on the bottle. When the fawns would arrive, we would put them into a clear box we constructed and keep them in these boxes until they started coming to the bottle. We wanted the fawns to come to the bottle because a fawn, or any deer in a any pen, for that matter, can easily hurt themselves by running into fences. If a fawn comes to its bottle, it will be less likely to run from us. Usually fawns would come to their bottle after about 3-4 days. To the right is the first set of twins we received.
	After the fawns regularly came to their bottle, we moved them into pens outside, where we continued to bottle-feed them. Each pen contained a shade structure, automatic water trough, and feeders. The fawns would nibble at the dirt and grasses out in their pens. To the left is a picture of some buck fawns lounging in the sun around mi-afternoon. Below are more pictures from my internship.


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