Tonight I did something potentially stupid, but it was awesome.
As I was leaving the office (March at Terry Fox: map) this evening around 8:30 PM I heard a noise in the area beside the building and it sounded like “Baaaaa.”
I thought to myself ‘was that a goat?’
I put my things in my car and looked around. I looked through the woods and saw the nearby Indian restaurant. I thought, would the restaurant have a pet goat? Or maybe it was tomorrow’s lunch.
Then I heard it again. “Baaaaa.”
I listened into the wind. I thought maybe I’m hearing something else further away, partially muffled by the wind. Like children playing in the distance.
“Baaaaa.”
Nope, that was close. It was coming from the woods. I could hear rustling in the trees. At first it sounded like something stepping very cautiously and carefully. There was more rustling and suddenly two shapes burst out of the woods into the grass field in front of me.
It was a coyote and a deer running straight towards me.
Then I did something potentially stupid. I stepped closer to get a better look at the coyote.
At first I thought the coyote was chasing the deer. Then I realised, no, it was the deer chasing the coyote. A moment later I could see a baby deer running across March Road towards the Alcatel-Lucent building. It barely made it across the road safely. The mother deer had been protecting the doe. It was the doe I had been hearing.
The chase looped through the grass right in front of me three more times before the coyote finally left, defeated by the determined doe.
I managed to get a few seconds of the chase on my iPhone but only remembered later that I had a Canon DSLR and 70-200mm f/2.8 lens in the trunk of my car, just metres away.