WELCOME WINTER!

Winter, Day Three (December 23rd): Storm's coming…


Maybe not knowing how to shoot the moon (oh, those annoying ISO's, exposures, apertures and f-stops) was a good thing?


Letting the camera try mostly on its own still made for a couple of neat images, at any rate.

After the storm (December 28th)…


The gray squirrels have only recently taken up permanent residence on/around my property (the mast-producing trees, i.e. nut and other edible-seed bearers, are finally mature enough to provide a reliable food source), so I have yet to tire of them. The only human-provided birdfeed they can get to is the cracked corn and white millet (the sunflower and peanut feeders are on baffled poles) and they are welcome to it; I have a soft spot for cute rodents. They also give the cats something to do. (Mostly work themselves into a frenzy with their inability to get at anything on the other side of the window. And the squirrels know this. Cruel cat lady? Me?)


Squirrels are not the only mammals that come begging. I love (love love love) venison, but I like it alive and on the hoof, too. Weird-looking creatures, really, are deer; must be something about those big brown eyes that makes them so appealing.


Hmmm, I see I'm going to have to buy more corn and millet… (The smallest deer, the one posing in the late afternoon sun below, was eyeing up the feeders at the front window as well, feeders which were even closer to the house than this one. She didn't come in while we were watching, but she got up the nerve sometime overnight, as evidenced by the incriminating hoof prints directly under the window, between a holly tree that hits the house and the house wall itself, this morning.)


Gotta love their eyelashes, but who knew deer had eyebrow whiskers like that?! Egads.


The great photo that wasn't quite. Welcome to the world of photography. Ah, well, they say practice makes perfect and as much as I hate practicing, at least with a digital I can shoot all the frames I want for practically nothing but time spent playing. (Hmm, note to self: also pick up more SD cards…)


Happy Winter!

BAD BABIES

Aha, whom do we have here…?


Bad babies! Where did you leave your mommas?

(These two had been properly chaperoned by their mothers when the four of them wandered through the meadow this morning. After an initial minute or two of curiosity this evening--the larger fawn actually took a step or two towards the truck--they did finally bolt. I didn't get much closer than it appears in the first photo; three cheers for telephoto!)

Heigh High-ho, cherry-oh.

They didn't taste all that wonderful to me, but I thought for sure this deer was going to go tippy-toe to reach the cherries.


Tick problem? Hah! This is nothing. I've managed an even poorer* photo wherein the afflicted deer's ear looks like a pimple ball. And then there was that poor buck in velvet that one year... Ooh-ooh-ooh. (Velvet=high blood flow tissue for growing the antlers.) Interesting how some deer have can have a terrible infestation (and on just one ear) and others are nearly tick-free.

* Sorry for the poor quality: taking deer photos is difficult enough--why do the birds see only the yard reflected in the windows but the deer can see through the glass so well they see me when I'm half way across the room???--but it would have helped at least a little if the windows had been clean.

HOW MANY IN A HERD?

Is five deer enough to call a herd? There were definitely five: two does, three yearlings. Three does, two yearlings? Maybe there were seven… They kept stopping and walking, stopping and walking, and every time I looked away and looked back they disappeared and I lost count. Deer don’t look camouflaged (not like the woodcock with its quite obvious "can’t see me" patterning) but oh, are they ever! That particular shade of non-descript brown, and those long skinny legs—amazing how well they blend in, even into the thin cover of my back yard.


(Unless it's summer, that is. These are three bucks who came wandering through early one summer. That blur barely visible above the tail-end sticking out from behind the tree would be #3. Can't remember, but there may have been one or two others, as well. See? Five. Magic number.)

Trouble is, they could see me inside the house perfectly well, so I wasn’t able to get any photos the other day. Bit skittish, this batch of deer. And that’s not a bad thing, given where they are living. Apparently there’s a newer neighbor around the corner who takes shots at them from his deck (much to the dismay of the gals who run the therapeutic riding center whose property also happens to meet up with his backyard as well as mine). I admit that I myself have been tempted to invite one of my hunting friends over for a visit during deer season; I love venison…

So instead of the "find the deer" photos I would have loved to have posted—and I regret even more missing a very artistic shot of a deer being trailed by the most wonderful water ripples it left in its wake as it walked through the flooded yard—I give you Galadriel. Born in the house and never let out, this was apparently her first-ever encounter with one of the deer:


Something’s out there!


What could it be?


I hope it doesn’t like cat…

She bolted soon after I snapped that last picture. Can’t blame her, really; she was young and had only had free run of the house for less than a year, so mammals this large were beyond her experience. (Wonder if she ever saw the horses? Yes, we’ve had horses visit—and other unexpected creatures—but that’s a story for a different day.)

Galadriel's brother Russell, on the other hand, appears to have slept through this chance at seeing a deer...