Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Other Mountain Wildlife and Livestock

Every evening at the farmhouse, we watched for the deer to come down from the hills to graze on the grassy meadows. The first night there were 7 of them. They seemed a little surprised that we were there to watch them. That night we watched as they jumped the pasture fence  to come within about 20 yards of us. In this picture they were in the field in the foreground. (They are not in this shot as it was too dark to photograph that night.)

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Another night, they were on the hill (behind the barn in this same picture) and I took the picture below. There are only 4 in this shot. One of the larger ones was very dark.100_2059

We also observed rabbits. One evening, the deer flushed a large rabbit and he remained in the midst of the small herd for some minutes. Rabbit pictures were too lousy to even put in! (Remember I said it drizzled a lot? Well, the light was really dim.)

The other mammal that was the most exciting to see was a woodchuck, or groundhog. We saw two on different roads on different days. This one was really shy and I took a bunch of pictures, but I am sorry to say, this was the only one even worth keeping. We had not seen a groundhog in decades, so this was pretty cool for us.

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Down the hill from the groundhog were some of the cutest little calves.

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Each day, we were visited by farm cats, who also hunted the birds that we watched. And every day, the horses passed the house on their daily grazing routine. Their heavy steps could be heard quite a ways off. Their favorite pasture seemed to be the one on the hill above the house. To see them from inside the house, we would stand at the window and look UP.

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