Tom Schrader, a lifelong Aurora resident, sat along the Fox River on the Benton Street bridge in downtown Aurora Wednesday morning, watching a baby falcon named Hope fly above the river he had helped rescue her from recently.
That’s when he saw a baby deer sitting alone, trapped on the downtown riverbank. He said he later found out the fawn was too young to survive on its own.
“My first thought was, how did the deer get there and where is its mother,” Schrader said.
Schrader, along with city staff, reported the baby deer’s situation to the Aurora Fire Department, which used its boat and a net to save the deer after multiple failed attempts, according to Jon Zaghloul, Aurora director of communications.
Aurora Firefighters Riley Coomes and Jonas Cebulski, along with Aurora Animal Control Officer Quentin Johnson, were on the boat that saved the deer, according to Zaghloul.
The fawn was transferred to the Kane Area Rehabilitation and Education for Wildlife Center in St. Charles, where staff named him Jonas after one of the firefighters who rescued him, Zaghloul said.
The fawn was recovering well as of Wednesday afternoon and had already joined the center’s general deer population, Zaghloul said.
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Alison Lindburg, Aurora’s sustainability director, said the incident demonstrates the care that the people of Aurora have for local wildlife.
“Everybody was making sure that this baby was getting taken care of, and I think it speaks very much to the fact that people in Aurora, we care about our river, we care about our wildlife,” Lindburg said.
A crowd had gathered on the bridge during the incident on Wednesday, peering over to watch the rescue. Lindburg said city staff had seen the fawn appear out of a drainage pipe earlier that day, and staff cheered when they found out the deer had been rescued.
Lindburg said she was unsure how the fawn ended up trapped along the river, but she said the river can fluctuate quickly and affect wildlife. She said a few weeks ago, she could see the bottom of the river, but last weekend the river flooded quickly due to storms.
“The river, once it does get very high, it’s actually very powerful, and it looks very fast, so even a baby deer, just bending down to drink some water, might have gotten swept up in the current,” she said.
“It can become a very different river very fast,” she said.
Zaghloul said to receive updates on the status of the fawn, people can go to https://www.facebook.com/KAREforWildlife.
The incident is one of several wildlife rescues in downtown Aurora this year.
Residents including Schrader rescued a baby falcon named Hope from the Fox River in downtown Aurora in June, and the Aurora Fire Department in the spring rescued a group of ducklings that had fallen down a storm drain near the department’s Central Fire Station on Broadway.
Lindburg said she learned about another rescue while she was walking downtown in May. She said she stumbled upon a few people holding a baby goose they had saved from a culvert.
The people who found him named him Lucky, and she said the baby goose was taken to Anderson Humane Wildlife Center in South Elgin.
“They didn’t have to do that, they didn’t necessarily have the resources to help, but they wanted to help,” she said.
She said Anderson Humane Wildlife Center in South Elgin has resources on its website about what to do if people find an abandoned or injured animal.