Bambi does Hallowe'en

From: Mercury News:

Trick or treat? Fawn tries on pumpkin pail
By Yomi S. Wronge
Mercury News

In 27 years of catching stray dogs and scooping up roadkill, William Warrior, Palo Alto's veteran animal control officer, had never seen anything like the deer in Chia Wu's Los Altos Hills yard.

It had a pumpkin head. A smiling, plastic orange pumpkin head.

The juvenile Columbian blacktail had shoved its face into a child's Halloween pail, presumably to lick the sticky-sweet residue of trick-or-treats past, and there it stuck. The plastic bucket was wedged smartly on the deer's little antler nubs.

Homeowner Wu discovered the silly sight about two weeks ago as she walked up her driveway. There among the blackberry bushes, along a running creek, was a deer statue.

She thought, ``That's a really weird place for a deer statue.'' Then it moved.

Wu first tried talking to the critter. ``Come on up and I'll take that off you,'' she cooed. (Hey, she later explained, it works in Disney movies.)

The deer wouldn't budge, so Wu called a professional. Warrior arrived, quickly assessed the situation and got to work.

Well, first he snapped a picture. Then he got to work.

``I tried to move in to capture him,'' Warrior said.

Blinded and terrified, the pumpkin-head deer bolted in circles, hopping over nettles and gullies at up to 30 miles per hour, slamming into oak trees and fence posts. Luckily, the pumpkin pail acted as a crash helmet.

``After he made a full circuit and a half, I anticipated his route and worked ahead of him,'' Warrior said.

He finally snared the 50-pound beast with a looped contraption and freed its little noggin, and off it went into the woods.

It was a career first for Warrior. Although, he noted, ``Occasionally, skunks get little Yoplait yogurt cups stuck on their heads.''