A large, impressively antlered sambar stag standing motionless in the back garden of a nearby house in the suburbs of SW Canberra. The house where we were looked down into the rear of the houses down the way, and they had a bush block on their boundary on the one side.
The wife saw him first at daybreak out the bathroom window when she got up for a wee, on a very cold winter Sunday morning in 2015. She roused me to come have a look and I frankly didn’t believe it was real, assumed it was a fibreglass deer statue or something. Was still pretty bleary eyed from the night before. As I went down to the truck to fetch the binos, he suddenly took off, I heard the wife shriek “It’s real !!!” He vaulted the garden fence like it wasn’t even there. Afterwards we realised that the mark in the frost and wisps of steam from his nose was a bit of a giveaway that he wasn’t fibreglass and I’ve always regretted leaving the room.
Later that morning we went over and asked the folk at that address about it, Indian Sikh family, they thought we were freakin’ mad and were genuinely concerned we were miscreants up to no good. I managed to convince the bloke to go look in his garden and he was fairly surprised, to say the least, to find all his nice shrubs pruned and a whole lot of large stag mark in his garden beds.
(Reason I stupidly assumed he wasn’t real was at the agri shows and hunting expos and so on, they always have lifesize models of deer, very life like indeed)
In the Victorian High Country, at a wee place called Woods Point, we saw a HUGE sambar browsing in the back garden of a small house there. We asked about it at the pub, deer had a name, forget what. He’s a regular visitor and somewhat cherished by the locals.