LAKEPORT — Two week-old fawns were returned to their mother after being rescued from a drainage pipe buried nearly seven feet underground in an undeveloped Lakeport property near Westside Park.
“We released them to momma this morning,” said Lake County Animal Care & Control Director Jonathan Armas on Friday.
The fawns had traveled five feet into an eight-inch drainage pipe on Thursday, where they became wedged at an underground depth of six and a half feet with no room to turn around, said Armas.
Lakeport Public Works, ABC Sewer & Drain, and JACO Heating & Air assisted with the rescue.
Armas said he got a call Thursday afternoon about what was “thought to be some trapped cats.” When he arrived on scene at 3:30, he peered into the drainage pipe—left uncovered by a construction mistake—and “saw a little head start poking out, and it ended up being a baby deer.”
So Armas grabbed a catch pole and managed to pull the fawn out of the pipe. But its sibling could still be heard screaming from deeper in the pipe, and Armas called for backup.
Jude Maldonado of ABC Sewer & Drain arrived with a snaking camera which he fed into the pipe, determining that the fawn would be too stuck to retrieve without cutting the pipe.
“It couldn’t turn around to get back to the hole that were were able to get the other from,” Armas said.
A Lakeport Public Works crew arrived with a backhoe and dug a large hole around the pipe, then cut the pipe and retrieved the fawn. Both babies were taken to Wasson Memorial Veterinary Clinic and held overnight.
Maldonado noted the fawns’ mother had stood a couple hundred feet away throughout the entire ordeal, watching her offspring unceasingly.
“The mom deer was watching the whole time,” Maldonado said.
It was a lesson in the bonds between animals.
“I’ve been in the sewer industry for 13 years,” Maldonado said. “That was by far the coolest thing that I’ve gotten to help with.”
Maldonado noted that considering there had been open-mouthed drainage pipes on that undeveloped property for years, “we’re lucky it was just a deer.”
Armas noted he’d put in a ticket with public works to get the pipes covered up.
