Morning Visitors

Today seems to be a day that I'm reaching for my camera. This is my second picture post on this site this morning. (If you click on the picture above, you will see a much larger version and you can see the deer better.) A little while ago I glanced out my front window and saw a family of deer crossing my front yard. They walked across the yard, the gravel driveway, and into the pine woods that surround my house. Now, having deer in your yard is really not something all that uncommon, but I think they are beautiful, and their appearance is always a Special Event for me. There are three of them, but this morning they never stood close enough together to get them all three in one shot. I think there is the mama doe and two younger ones. I have seen as many as five together with a young buck among them, but that's rare. If you'd like to see my other pictures of them, I added them to my Picasa WebAlbum "Animals Around My Place." When I saw them, I grabbed my camera, and stepped out my front door onto the porch, which is about 15' high off the ground and the deer were another 20' to 25' away, the original pictures contained a lot of surrounding, uninteresting yard, so I cropped them to get a better view of the deer themselves. This morning is a very bright, sunny day with morning temperatures in the upper 20's F warming to something like 66F this afternoon. I think the temperature at the time I saw the deer was something like 38F. These deer browse through my front yard and into the surrounding woods three or four times a week, usually during the mid-morning hours. What a treat to be living out here in the boonies!

As an experiment, I'm going to try to embed a slideshow of this "Animals around my place" Picasa album below.