Daily deercam

  She isn't bringing her fawn in yet.  Tiny tracks just downstream to the left.

  Healing.  Might have the fawn on the ground somewhere close, though she mostly comes at night.

  I've got a beaver-cut walking stick I pulled out of the dam when the beaver were working.  Bark-stripped wood of the right weight and length.  I stick it in the leaves at the end of the trail next to the parking slot.  The beaver that cut it is dead and his bones scattered and the raw wood of the stick has faded grey.  Everything changes.

  My privacy is about to be interrupted.  The museum is going top build a path and observation deck in the next month.  Today I went out while they were marking the site and approach and while they turned the maps and elevation charts I checked the cam.   396 photos on the card.  There are tiny fawn tracks along a sandbank 50 yards downstream but no fawn in the files.  Yet.

  I put out the last of this sack of crumbly corn and took a long wandering walk downstream through the steaming woods.  It's hot if you move in there.  Every leaf that is going to grow this summer has grown and is busy cycling water vapor and CO2.  There were some little owls who flew away from me in ever-expanding arcs as I walked the far fork of the creek.  No turtles in the deep pools.  The back fence neighbors had dumped cut up trees on the back of the museum land within the week.  Animal sign everywhere.

Update:  I'm assuming that using my super-tracking and finely honed observing and hunting skills I could find these fawns stashed close under the edge of a fern.  Just hate to disturb the does.  Too much fun photographing them.  Gotta be some bucks around, but I think this creek corner in the brush is just big enough for these does to hide in and use as a nursery.  It's not prime buck habitat.  No rubs.  Not on the way to or from anywhere important to a whitetail.