A couple posing for their wedding photos on the Felt Estate in Saugatuck, Michigan, was interrupted by a wild deer, according to multiple reports.
The couple Morgan and Luke were posing for their golden hour portraits when a wild deer approached from a distance, according to The Dodo. According to the media outlet, the deer casually walked over to the bride and groom and greeted the couple.
“We walked over this hill and made it to a field where we saw just over a wooden fence was a deer,” Laurenda Marie Bennett, the photographer taking the couple’s portraits, told The Dodo. “As soon as we arrived, the deer looked up and just casually walked over the bride and groom.”
After greeting the couple, the deer noticed the bouquet and attempted to eat the flower arrangement, the media outlet reported. According to Fox News, the bride and groom were not at all put off by the deer and its attempt to eat the bouquet—in fact, they were pretty amused by the situation. Bennett captured the moment in a post on her Facebook page.
“Deer: 1, Bouquet: 0,” Bennett wrote. “When the field you want to take bride & groom portraits in has an overtly friendly deer … you roll with it until the deer decides the bouquet is lookin’ like a good snack.”
Bennett told The Dodo that the deer was hanging around the bride and groom, snacking on the bouquet.
“[He] started reaching his neck over and grabbing flowers from her bouquet and just chewing away. Then he steps over the fence, so he’s standing in front of them, and he’s just hanging out eating her bouquet,” Bennett said, according to The Dodo.
The bride and groom got a good laugh out of it, and according to Bennett, the expressions from the couple made the wedding photos even more special.
“We were all kind of giggling and looking at each other like, ‘what’s going on? What should we do?'” Bennett said, according to The Dodo. “Morgan’s expressions were priceless—they just kind of made the photos.”
Ultimately, the bride and groom decided to just give the deer the bouquet after the animal’s many attempts to eat it, and used one of the bridesmaid’s flower arrangements as a backup bouquet toss—a tradition for weddings where the bride tosses the bouquet and whoever manages to catch it would be next in line to get married—but decided that it was worth it because they got a good laugh out of it, the media outlet reported.
The bride and groom left to continue their celebration. They returned later on in the night and found that the deer had left the bride and groom a wedding gift—a single white rose, according to The Dodo.
“When we walked back to the area where we dropped the bouquet, the deer was gone, but there was one white rose still intact,” Bennett said, the Dodo reported.
“She picked it up and joked, ‘It’s the final rose.'”
According to The Dodo, the deer was famous around the area—it had photobombed several other weddings earlier in the summer.
“Never in a million years did I think I’d run into [the deer], especially when photographing a wedding,” Bennett said, “I felt like it was meant to be.”
