, great pictures.
About 30 or so years ago my wife and I were doing some spring counting in the Methow. We were sitting on a small ridge looking towards another ridge about 200 yards away. The ridge we were glassing is a pretty good fawn dropping area, has been since my great grandparents used to do spring counts going back to the 1920,s. We were there and had counted around 50 deer or so along the bluff filled ridge when my wife had a doe in her binos that was acting real strange, I put my glasses on it, it was in an open area that had few trees but lots of tall sage, south facing slope. The doe would take off running about 20 or so yards, stomp both front feet at the same time and then run back, it repeated this over and over, sometimes running up hill, sometimes down, some times straight out but would always run back to the same spot and repeat. We watched this for probably 10-15 minutes and kept are bins on it just mesmerized by its actions. We noticed it would look up every once in awhile, straight up. We looked up and seen 2 bald eagles about 300 feet or so above, just circling and circling, while the doe did its thing. I noticed a small fawn maybe a few days old laying in the brush that the doe would keep running back to, stomp, stand and then wander off in all different directions. I told my cousin about it who was a biologist at the time working for Idaho fish and game. He said what I figured was going on, the doe was trying to divert/catch the eagles attention and have them chase her to protect the fawn she had tucked away, the doe would even act like it was wounded and limp as it would walk or run away, pretty amazing, I had never seen anything like it that went on for that long, the eagles eventually gave up after 15-20 minutes.
