Found a baby animal? Read this first

Re-read this every May — fawn season is when good intentions do the most damage.

That fawn is not abandoned

Does deliberately park their fawns alone — sometimes for up to eight hours at a stretch — because a motionless, nearly scentless, spotted fawn is safer without its mother drawing attention to it. The fawn lying quietly in your flowerbed is doing exactly what ten thousand years of instinct designed. Take a photo from a distance if you like; do not touch it, do not move it, keep the dog inside. Mom comes back when it’s quiet, and the fawn is usually gone by morning.

Is it really orphaned? Species by species

• Fawns: alone all day = normal. See above.
• Bunnies: mothers visit the nest only around dawn and dusk, on purpose. A nest of warm, quiet bunnies with no mom in sight is a healthy nest. (The classic test: lay two twigs in an X over the nest; if they’re disturbed by morning, she’s been back.)
• Fledgling birds: a fully feathered young bird hopping on the ground, squawking, parents scolding nearby — that’s a normal life stage, not a fall. Leave it; move it gently to a shrub only if it’s in immediate danger from traffic or pets.
• Ducklings and goslings: with a parent, fine; truly alone for hours, see below.
• Raccoons and squirrels: mothers retrieve fallen babies — give her a quiet day to do it (a fallen squirrel kit can be placed in an open box at the tree’s base).

The genuine emergency signs

Flies or maggots on the animal. Visible injury or bleeding. The parent confirmed dead nearby (the roadside case). A fawn wandering and bleating for hours on end — not lying quietly, but crying and walking. Cold, weak, or soaked babies in those situations may truly need help — and the legal sequence matters:

Call a licensed wildlife rehabilitator FIRST, before touching anything. The DNR maintains a searchable list at Michigan.gov/WildlifeRehab. Rehabilitators will tell you whether to intervene and exactly how. Removing an animal from the wild is allowed only when the parent is known dead or the animal is injured — and after that contact.

Why you can’t just raise it

Beyond being illegal — only licensed rehabilitators may possess live wildlife in Michigan — it almost never works. Hand-raised wild animals imprint on people, can’t be released, carry diseases and parasites your family and pets can catch, and are routinely euthanized when discovered, which is the ending nobody wanted. The kindest thing is usually the hardest: leave it be, and let the professionals take the real emergencies.

The signpost

The DNR’s Keep Wildlife Wild pages carry the seasonal guidance; the rehabilitator list is the door for real emergencies. Start with the wildlife rules pillar for everything else.