Fawning season is well on its way at Mr. Alren “Benny” Cenac, Jr.’s Golden Ranch Whitetails and we could not be more excited about it. The season begins in late spring and lasts well into the summer. After about a 200 day gestational period, starting anywhere between October and March, a doe will give birth to 1-3 fawns at a time; thus, the beginning of the most rewarding part of the process for us. Not only is it the most important time of year at Golden Ranch Whitetails but it also happens to be the busiest. After many years of experience, we have perfected the fawning process. We leave half of the fawns to nurse from their mothers while the other half are bottle fed. Although fawns get the best nutrition from their mother, we like to bottle feed some to prepare them to be tame and calm deer in their pens. Bottle feeding a fawn is a very time consuming task as it involves a lot of patience and careful interaction. While this is a very tedious job, we love every second we get to spend not only feeding the young deer but spending time playing and connecting with them in between feedings as well. The time we spend bonding with the fawns between each feeding is equally, if not more gratifying and enjoyable than the feedings themselves. Each fawn is fed four times a day at 6am, 10am, 2pm, and 6 pm. They get Vitamin D milk in their bottles and a cup of cut up fruits and bread as a treat. This method continues for about 12 weeks until they are weaned off of milk and begin to shift to pelleted deer feed.  Although, the bottle feeding route is often challenging, it turns out to be extremely satisfying once we have deer that are calm and tame enough to be eating animal crackers out of our hands. If you are interested in learning more about Mr. Cenac’s whitetail program, please contact us at https://www.goldenranchwhitetails.com/contact-us/