On Sunday, April 5, the afternoon sunshine and warm temperatures prompted me to take a walk down the Community Path from Davis Square to the Alwife Reservation along the Little River. Though I've walked the along the north bank of the river many times, on Sunday for the first time I followed the trail all the way to the silver maple forest and the shore of Little Pond. After taking a few pictures of the pond and filling my pack with plastic trash and beer cans littering the shore by the end of the path, at about 4:45 I headed back. Where the trail left the woods and entered a meadow, I saw a deer grazing about 100 feet away. As far as I could tell checking a map later, the spot is in Cambridge near the Belmont line, just west of a widening of the Little River called Perch Pond.

The deer was apparently a young adult, about 4 1/2 or 5 feet tall, with no sign of antlers. After staring at me for a moment it went back to grazing, and I slowly walked up to about 30 feet away and took a few pictures with my cell phone. Now and then I rustled the grass with my feet to get the deer to raise its head for a picture. After doing this a few times it lifted its head then lowered it a bit and pulled back its ears, letting me know it was time to move along.

At home I checked the Friends of the Alewife Reservation website and was happy to find that there have been other recent sightings of deer, and saw the stunning photos taken in September 2007 by one member:
http://friendsofalewifereservation.org/2007_Archive/2007-09-14-deer-sightings.htm This was about my fourth sighting of wild deer and, as with the other accounts posted in the archives at the Alewife Reservation's website, was by far the closest encounter. It is no suprise that in the narrow corridor of an urban nature reserve we may be more likely to observe deer and other wildlife at close range than in more remote places.

Robert Dale Somerville