A couple employees of the Slatington Borough Water Department came across a surprising find early Wednesday morning: a baby deer.

Steve Martinez said he was out by the backwash ponds around 6:30 a.m. when he heard a loud cry, almost like the sound of a lamb bleating. He looked down into one of the 10-foot-deep backwash ponds, and there at the bottom was a frightened fawn. The fawn let out a few more bleats as it stood in 53-degree water up to its neck.

“It’s a good thing it was drained,” he said. The tank often has several feet of water in it.

Martinez and his co-worker Mike Evans grabbed a ladder and lowered it into the concrete pond, then they climbed down into the container. He took an old blue sheet he used for rags and wrapped it around the fawn. It didn’t try to run away or even wiggle out of his arms.

“When I picked it up, it laid its head on my chest like it was saying thank goodness,” he said.

Martinez said Evans climbed about three quarters of the way up the ladder, and then he handed the fawn to him to take up the rest of the way. When they got to the top, they saw the mother deer.

“The mother was right there,” he said.

She was on the other side of the fence snorting and upset.

Evans placed the uninjured fawn on the ground, and it got up and ran to its mother. It happened so fast that they didn’t have time to take a picture of it, he said.

Martinez said he thinks the fawn must have gotten into the complex through a small section of split rail fence at the back of the property. All of the rest of the property has a different type of fence around it.

He said something like this has never happened at the water treatment center, and he’s been there since 1984. Still he’s glad they were there at the right time.

“Mike and I are both outdoorsmen. We just did what we thought was right,” he said. “We just felt like (rescuing it) was our job.”

Borough manager Dan Stevens said he thought their efforts deserved to be recognized.

“I just thought it was great what they did,” he said, and added that they also saved some baby ducklings from a stormwater grate that day. “These guys are really looking out for the wildlife in the town.”