Enter Flag

I wrote a blogpost with lots of video of a certain tufted titmouse doing all kinds of hopeful things: picking at terrycloth out of boredom, glugging down a big chunk of hard boiled egg yolk all by himself; picking up some special food I made for him out of a dish. And then everything suddenly went south and the next morning his head was upside down, and he was helpless again. Nothing I did made any difference. I kept feeding him and gently manipulating his neck, hoping to ease him out of it, but he faded before my eyes. He had a seizure and died at 8:14 AM on December 3. It was hard. I was very sad. I was mad at myself for telling you all his story before I knew how it would end. I'm not usually that rash. I usually protect my readers from the worst stuff. I wanted to spread some joy, that this little bird was going to have a fighting chance. And in the end, he didn't. That's how it goes in rehab, and especially with head trauma. Recovery is anything but certain. Those birds that hit your window, lie there for awhile, and fly away? There's always more to the story, and sometimes it's a story you don't want to hear.

Early that morning, right at daybreak, I was sitting in my recliner, staring out the window at the slowly lightening meadow. I was putting off checking on the titmouse because he'd been noticeably weaker when I tucked him in the night of December 2. I didn't even want to peek at him, so I sat and wrote in my journal and watched the meadow taking shape in the rising light.

And a doe came walking across the meadow, along the edge where I stop mowing the yard. I grabbed the living room binoculars (there are also bedroom binoculars, kitchen binoculars and studio binoculars--lots of binoculars) and studied her. I recognized her face instantly. My God, it was Flag!

                                                                             29 Oct 2017

Now, it was too dark to get a photo, but my binoculars picked up every detail as I scurried from window to window. I will say I recognized her from the first glance. The first thing I noticed were oversized buff eye-rings. The next thing I noticed were her smallish, rounded ears. I checked her body type: long, with rather short legs. Then I checked her bib--large but indistinct. Oh my God, she had big white flashes between her toes--bigger on the hind feet! It's Flag-it's Flag!! The last thing to check was her tail. When I finally got a good look at it, it was pale red on top, with no black on it--which is unusual. Put those six features together and my often muddled but occasionally marvelous brain spits out one answer: It's Flag!

                                 

                                                                           1 Feb 2017

It was Flag. I had not the slightest doubt. I had not seen her since March 2018! Where had she been?

        

 6 Mar 2018--the last time I saw her.

She'll never tell. Flag is very special to me. She is, as far as I know, Ellen's last surviving offspring. Ellen was the crooked little doe I followed for nine years. Ellen was killed by an arrow right along my driveway early on the morning of November 2, 2016, wasted, left for me and the coyotes to find.

Her twin fawns, Pinky and Flag, were only five or six months old. God bless Buffy for taking them on. Buffy had been Ellen's closest companion; I always suspected she was Ellen's sister. 

Here's Buffy in back, and Flag in front. 

Now, Buffy's in the lead. See how Buffy's legs and pelt are suffused with ochre? She was buffy all over, hence the name. 

                                                                             29 Oct 2017

This is my earliest photo of Flag, 14 Dec. 2016. What jumps out at you? For me, it's the white between her toes. What a gift that little marker is. 

                                         

Her twin brother, Pinky, had white toe flashes too.

          

         12 Jan 2017

By October 18, 2017, Pinky had grown his first spikes. You can see the pink nose for which I named him. 

I lost track of Pinky after that fall, as one loses track of bucks. It's not that I wasn't looking for him...it's that he never turned up again.  But Flag, being a small doe, survived. 

                                                                            17 Oct 2017

                                                                         9 Dec. 2017

                                                                              11 Dec. 2017

Here are those small rounded ears, that unmarked tail showing well. 

                                                                            17 Jan 2017

She reminds me so much of Ellen in these shots. Man, I miss those deer coming around. 

                                                                             4 Nov 2017

To have Flag come walking through the backyard, on the very morning when another soul had to leave, was such a gift. I had bonded pretty fiercely with that titmouse, and I was determined to see him through. I thought what I'd be seeing him through to was release, but it didn't work out that way. So it goes some of the time, too much of the time. Seeing Flag helped so much. She spoke of  persistence against all odds, of hope, just as my own hopes were being dashed. 

17 Oct 2017

Look at what remains, she said. Look at all you still have that brings you joy. My mother and brother and Aunt Buffy are gone, but I'm still here. I have fawns you haven't met. And that might have something to do with the cur-dog you brought here, mightn't it? 

                                                                            30 Jan 2018

Yes, Flag, it might. I am going to keep watching for you, as I have every sunrise since I saw you. Like seeing a ghost, it was. I need a fresh portrait of you, little short-legged Garbo among does, small like your mother and your aunt, and so dear to me. Oh my gosh, I have just noticed the two small white dots atop your shiny black nose. I've looked, and they're in every photo. Attention. Attention. Attention. Nothing is too small to notice. Everything is important, everything is a clue.

I came in from a long morning of sawing sumac and hauling honeysuckle around 11 AM and was out on the deck tracking  Curtis when a big chocolate-colored buck emerged from the newly cleared area. Nice to have a way through the honeysuckle, innit? I had neither binoculars nor camera, and I raced through the living room, cursing, to get the closest pair of bins. The living room binoculars had migrated to the foyer. One can't have too many strewn around the house... I knocked over a hand-made end table in my rush, atop which, as it happened, was a box with an antique porcelain elephant inside.  (I had to stop to laugh for a minute while writing this; it's sooo Zick.) The table and box went flying. All this I noted as I streaked past, but Job One was to get the binoculars. Nothing else mattered. Happily, neither the table nor the bubble-wrapped elephant in its box were hurt in the least, while I have another spectacular bruise forming on my thigh, to join the bruises already there, from the butt ends of branches and cruel rose canes that I fight every morning in my "daily practice" of mano a mano combat with invasive plants. By the time I raced back, jumping over the fallen table, binocs in hand, the buck had leapt across the meadow and was but a dark tail disappearing into the pines. See, that's what deer do to me.  They make a blur of me. I want so badly to know them better, to trace their arcs, as I traced Ellen's and Buffy's. I will knock myself silly in pursuit of knowledge like that. And the only way to get it:  Be. There.

As I sit here writing, I'm thinking of a bit of Robert Frost's poem, "Birches:" 

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig’s having lashed across it open.

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

One of my eyes is indeed weeping from a twig's having lashed across it open. (God, the beauty and precision of Frost's wording).  It hurts, but I expect it'll be all right. The other eye isn't weeping; it's watching five brand new blue jays who have come to the yard at long, long last. They've finally arrived, weeks later than usual, and it's time to pile up the cinder blocks and build a new Cyanocity jay feeder for them. Hope I don't drop a cinder block on my foot, but I hold the possibility open. 

Right off the bat, I don't recognize any of them, but I'm peering, Popeye-like,  at the camera playback and sorting through each tiny feature, because this is how we learn.

                   

  For those who wonder, yes, Flag is named for the fawn in The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. A formative book among many formative books. I might have identified with Jody, who raised Flag, just a little bit.

Whitetail: Trophy, Food, or Friend?

A peaceful and increasingly rare sight on Indigo Hill--a doe keeping company with a crow, as the first morning gold streaks the meadow. Mid-June 2021

You may have noticed that my stories about the deer I know have dropped off the blog. No Ellen, no Buffy, no Flag or Pinky or Jolene, no TinyTine, no Lil' Pisser no mo. No buck sparring matches in the meadow. Where have they gone?

In the long view, hunting pressure has increased exponentially around my 80-acre sanctuary in the last five years. One 160-acre property that borders my land to the south and was closed to hunters for 30 years is now owned by avid hunters. That piece of land includes the house (the so-called Pink Palace) where Bill lived his last year. So there's that.

On the north neighboring side, multiple corn feeders, game cameras and a new feedplot are in use. A lot of animals are being taken.

A bit farther down the road is a 250-acre property that's also got feeders and feed plots, and is enthusiastically hunted. 

These pieces of land all connect; I've seen deer I know, like the magnificent buck TinyTine, both in my backyard and in the middle of that 250-acre piece. TinyTine has been gone for two years, taken, as I knew he would be. He had ten points; he showed up on the game cameras; he was marked. The allure of all those corn feeders is too great. While I am endlessly grateful that these properties are still in woodland and not, say, in housing developments, and I'd far rather have hunting lands neighboring mine than tract housing or drill sites, I can't fail to notice the impact of this newly intensive land use.

TinyTine (right) kisses an 8-point buck with whom he was just lightly sparring, Jan. 8, 2019. See the little lobster claws at the end of his main beam? Contrary to popular belief, bucks can stay good friends throughout the rut. They aren't at all the testosterone-blinded rage machines that pop hunting culture makes them out to be. Bucks, according to Joe Hutto, are tender, sensitive animals who often keep strong bonds with their mothers, and happen each year to grow large bony prongs people covet.

Needless to say, with all the change in land use, I've noticed a distinct drop in deer numbers. More than that, I don't recognize anyone any more. I miss the quiet, gentle neighbors I used to enjoy so much, but they're gone like April snow. Curtis went to investigate some piles of skins and skeletons strewn beside a nearby hunting cabin late last winter and came back home carrying Buffy's tail. 

How did I know? She was the only

deer I'd ever seen with a fox-red tail. Ellen's was red, too, but Buffy's was fox-red. That was a bad moment for me, looking down at Buffy's severed tail in my hand. But that, in a nutshell, is what it's like to fall in love with a deer. It isn't likely to end well.

Buffy had been Ellen's closest companion. They were either sisters or mother and daughter--I never knew which. Buffy took on Ellen's last two fawns, Pinky and Flag, when Ellen was killed at at least 9 years of age by a thoughtless arrow, and left in a sad little heap along my driveway in November 2016. Buffy cared for those fawns as if they were her own. I figure she had to be at least 13 when she was killed.

February 3, 2014. Buffy grooming Ellen.

And why was Buffy killed? Because she was there, and she didn't think to look up when she came to the corn feeder under their tree stand. They didn't know her like I did. They didn't know her at all.

I searched my computer, and I have 60 photos of Buffy, stretching from 2009 to 2018. Nine years is a long time to follow a deer, to fall in love, to see her through the seasons and a weeping, eventually ulcerated eye that somehow got better; to see her through everything else that happens to a wild deer. The feelings I had toward the deer who lived here are what make me bite my tongue nearly in two when I interact with some of my neighbors. Suffice it to say we are at cross purposes, and I am outnumbered.

I've just finished reading Joe Hutto's book, Touching the Wild: Living with the Mule Deer of Deadman Gulch. Most will remember Hutto from "My Life as a Turkey," a PBS TV re-enactment of his experience incubating and raising chicks from a clutch of wild turkey eggs he found, about to hatch but abandoned. The incandescent book he produced from the experience of following the poults through the woods, watching them grow in wisdom and experience, is one that has shaped me greatly. It's called Illumination in the Flatwoods. I read it when it first came out in 1995 and was never the same again. I'll say the same about this book.

Touching the Wild hit me hard, kept me up at night, thinking. If you like your natural history sugar-coated, you won't like this book. But then, if you liked things that way, you probably wouldn't be here, reading my stuff. It's not always sweet. There are the occasional severed tails.

That said, if you'd like to know something of what goes on between doe and fawn, in the heads and hearts of these remarkable creatures, I highly recommend it. It is humbling to learn how utterly out of touch humans, whether hunters, wildlife managers, or observers, are with the minds and souls and welfare of the animals they profess to "know," "harvest," and "conserve." Hutto was himself once a hunter. Enough said. Mr. Hutto, I am your kid sister in Ohio, and I watch my wild neighbors with the same raw and oft-broken heart that guides you. I don't feed them, and I can't touch them, but I feel for them.

So in that context, when I, weeding the garden, got an alert from my phone that my Moultrie trailcam had new photos just a few hundred yards down the meadow, I was gobsmacked to see these thumbnails roll in. Yes, I have a trailcam setup, gifted to me by Bart Stephens of Wingscapes.com, which sends real-time alerts on my iPhone when something interesting walks by my trailcam.

This was interesting. And I was staring down the meadow from my east hill, knowing this was unfolding, unseen...it's so freaking cool.

I didn't know the doe at the time, but I instantly empathized with her. You'll have to look at the timestamps on the photos to understand why this series of photos hit me so hard. As my (noble and ethical) hunter friend Matt Mullenix commented, "No coincidences there."

She stood sentinel

Six minutes by the camera’s count

Her fawn sporting in circles

I, gratefully spying with magic electrons.

Finally it was time.

Her fawn fed, she bedded it down

Scentless and warm

Where she hoped no tooth or claw would find it.

That’s a doe’s life, isn’t it?

Nothing but gamble and hope.

Trying again, year upon year.

Today was all right. 

We'll see about tomorrow.

I wrote this post in mid-June 2021, moved by the story that unfolded in snapshots before my eyes. I am happy to say that both the doe and fawn made it, and I watched that little thing grow all summer and fall, almost always running as it passed the camera. I wish it luck in the naked, weepy woods of November, with the booms of men sighting in their guns for the upcoming season echoing all around. I'm bracing for another hunting season. Each year, it gets harder for me to endure. Like many Americans, I've been thinking a lot about guns lately, and now I'm hearing them all around again. It's that time of year.

What I'm trying to convey with these stories is that, despite the attitude some hold, hunters don't own the privilege of being in the woods, or knowing something about deer. That sounds a bit odd, but you have to place it in the context of my being a lone woman with gray coming into her hair, who has lived here for nigh on 30 years, surrounded by hunters, and now moreso than ever. Unlike most people in this area, I go out into the woods nearly every day of my life, all year around--not just for a few weekends in November. When I interact with hunters and I'm treated, as I sometimes am, with disrespect and bluster, even shouted at as I make my way through the woods, it freezes something down inside me, hard and still as rock. Hunters are not the only people who belong in the woods, or know something of what goes on there. Nor do they have dominion over the earth or its animals, whatever the dogma states. Their weapons don't make them king. They only make hunters something to which I and the animals must give a wide berth. Most demand my deference with firepower and nothing more. Only a very few will ever earn my respect. They know who they are. And only they know why it's something worth earning.

Tell me something I don't know about deer. Tell me something about the does I knew and followed for a dozen years before you killed them. Tell me about their children, about the small white flash between their toes that told me they were Ellen's. Did you notice that? Tell me about the soft-eyed buck who came up to my studio window just as he had as a fawn: Ellen's son, all grown up. About the long looks we exchanged, the pictures of his mother that I saw in his eyes. He nosed the feeders, sipped from the bird bath. He knew he was safe with me. How many points did he have? How much did he dress out to? Tell me what you know about deer, you who descend for a few weeks or days each year and shoot them over piles of muddy corn.

I'm here, watching.

Here, listening.

Here, learning.

If you're intrigued by my setup, go to the Wingscapes website to find Moultrie Mobile trailcams set up for AT&T or Verizon, that will send lo-res thumbnails right to your phone in real time. When you get a keeper, you can click on it and download the hi-res version to your phone or computer, which I did for this blogpost. These cameras will be available soon at Wingscapes, and they are available now at BassPro, Cabela's,Dick's, Sportsman's Warehouse and Academy. They will be in Walmart soon as well. If they're not available on the Wingscapes website, please feel free to buy from any of the other outlets listed.

I can attest that it's exhilarating to get those notices that Something has just walked by your trailcam; to see what's stirring in the middle of the night, and sometimes, if you're very lucky, to piece together a story like this one. I'd never have known this was happening but for my Moultrie Mobile camera! Many thanks to Bart Stephens for setting me up with the latest and greatest technology for my studies.

Stinkin' Up the Place

Who goes there? 

 My friend Geoff Heeter introduced me to the concept of spread in antlers. A buck has to be 31/2 or 4 1/2 years old before the antlers spread beyond the span of the ears. I think I have that right. You can see that, while this one has a high crown and long tines, the antlers still spread no further than the ears do. This is not something I've picked up on before. I mean, I knew a wide spread meant an older buck, but I didn't know the numbers. Thank you, Heets.

I didn't know at first what brought them, these bucks, walking proudly through the meadow of another gray morning. All I knew was to praise them and start shooting, or rather, clicking, gathering my trophies, my snippets, my memories.

First was a proud, high-crowned eight-point. Not particularly massive or aged, like the brace of beauties in my last post, but so beautiful nonetheless. Any buck is a great treat for me.

He seemed to be looking for someone.

By and by he slipped into the honeysuckle and sumac tangle, taking a well-worn deer road down into the woods.

Following a hunch, I hugged my big lens and skittered through the house to the studio. There, I found my little friend Flag, Ellen's daughter peeking out from behind the birch trunks. Flag was born in the spring of 2016, with a twin brother named Pinky, so she's 2 1/2 years old now. 

 And it became apparent that Flag was, in hunter's parlance, "stinkin' up the place." It appeared she was still in estrous, on December 9. She must be really fast to have escaped getting knocked up in the first rut.

On another hunch, I peeked out the west window of the studio and whoa! There was a buck I call TinyTine, lurking around the fallen pine in the backyard.  TinyTine is a ten point, but just barely. See that tiny tine on the beam of the near antler? That's his claim to 10 point fame. I've been following him for several months. I see him regularly at a corn feeder about a mile to the east of my house. And now here he was right in my backyard! His other nickname is CornHog.

Flag knew when to get gone. She moved down toward the meadow, peeing as she went.

 

TinyTine, you'd best get going.

 TinyTine followed, checked that stuff out.

Mmm. I love the smell of estrous in the morning. See his partly opened mouth? He's doing flehmen, passing the scent through his vomeronasal, or Jacobson's organ, assaying it for hormones. This area is a patch of chemoreceptive cells in the nasal cavity, just above the hard palate. TinyTine is huffing Flag's urine, passing it through his Jacobson's organ, testing it.

Flag must've passed his test. After all, it's #flehmenfriday. The chase was on.

This will be a several-part post about one magical December morning. I'll post as I can, when I can find a couple hours to rub together. It's a challenge to even get the photos sorted and edited, much less write them up; it's taken days. But I don't want to lose this morning. I want to remember it.

Happy Thanksgiving Critter Update

I'm not sure what this post is going to be about, except that it's about gratitude. It's about being amazed and grateful every single day at the things I'm able to witness. The house is like a blind and I watch from every window, unseen. And when I see something good I either shoot through the windows (usually) or I ease a door open and slip quietly outside and schneak up on whatever it is I've spotted. 

 

The meadow is like a great big canvas, and the frost and the plants and the deer are always painting something on it.  

A mother and fawn come walking slowly up the meadow around dawn on a frosty morning. I scurry like a scalded ape into the studio where my big camera lives. Then I ease the sliding glass door open and step outside onto the raised deck, into the breathtaking cold. 

If I do it right, they never know I've come outside. I have to do it slowly and keep a low profile, moving only when they're not looking up.  I love deer photos when they're not looking right at me. Candids are ever the best, whether you're at a wedding or just a walking.

One local I keep tabs on is a rabbit, born in early summer 2018, that Phoebe named Half-ear Smalley. Out of the oodles of rabbits born here this year, this brave little one has survived and now comes to the feeder. I don't know what happened to its ear. Mowed off as a kit? Who could say?

I put corn and seed on this flowerpot, which is now a Smalley feeder.

 These pictures are for Phoebe who named the rabbit and will be happy to know it is still pigging out at its flowerpot feeder. It never took the carrots she kept putting out for it. I think that thing about rabbits liking carrots is maybe a fable. Smalley likes corn!

Speaking of candid shots, this is one I've been after for months. I kept hearing a woodpecker doing something at the corner of my south studio window. I didn't know what it was doing, and I'd never been able to catch it red-handed...or naped...

until one day when I heard it and scuttled into the kitchen with my big rig and captured a male redbelly in the process of gagging up a peanut

which he then wedged into the window sash for easier processing. He didn't seem to be cacheing it (otherwise I'd have a cascade of peanuts when I open the window). He was just using the window frame to hold it for pecking apart.

 Mystery solved, and no damage being done. Thank you, little redbelly. I will now smile when I hear your claws scritching on the window frame, and the ratt-a-tat of your pecking, and try to get more photos of you, instead of wondering whether you're pecking holes in my bank account.

And only a few days later, I found him poking sunflower hearts into Liam's bedroom window. He was perched on the crappy weatherstrip that comes with newer Pella windows, and that invariably peels off and sticks out, no matter how many letters you send to HQ in Iowa.

The "technician" who came here twice told me it was my house's fault that the weatherstrip peeled off the windows. Oh. Really. I see. No, I don't. Seriously???

  One thing good I can say about the weatherstripping on these windows: When it peels off, and it will, it makes a handy redbelly perch. Even if it makes your house look tacky.

 I spend a great deal of time photographing blue jays. It is probably an understatement to say I'm obsessed with them.

I'm obsessed with capturing blue jays in flight. It's more fun than any video game you could dream up, and all you have to do is put corn and sunflower and peanuts out, then wait for them to fly down or up to it.

I get a lot of terrible photos. I get some images that are almost great. Oops!

 And every once in a great while I get something that takes my breath away, and the reward is rare and intermittent enough that I keep pressing that lever, hoping, hoping, hoping. Please click on this one. And if that's not a bird of Paradise then I don't want to go to Paradise. I want to stay right here.

 This is Frost, the silver-browed bird who first showed up December 27, 2017, right after I last saw Jemima. 

Against all expectations, Frost stayed to breed here this past spring, and then disappeared in August when his two kids were on their own. And then he came back in October. He has a pattern of being gone for two to three months at a time. I have no idea where he goes. I'm just ecstatic when he returns. He checks in at the feeder every four or five days lately. I'll take it. I take whatever I can get when it comes to blue jays.

 

 Jays, a couple of doves, and my beautiful little Japanese Stewartia, showing fabulous fall color, even though it didn't bloom this past summer. That's OK. I can tell it's winding up for a great show in 2019.

On Liam's birthday, November 8, Frost came into the feeder area. He stopped my heart by flying right up to the window, the way Jemima used to do. He bounced lightly off the netting and landed on the tomato cages just outside, the way Jem used to. Oh my gosh. It was like seeing a beautiful ghost.

He gave me a real close look at his silver brows before he went back to gathering corn again.  What Frost displays is not leucism. It's called progressive graying, and it's analogous to mine (and maybe yours). I don't know how old Frost is, but he's pretty silver. That said, there's a hatch year jay in my gang this winter who shows about half that much silver, so I don't think it's necessarily age-related in birds.

To be only a few feet from a jay--it still takes my breath away. I love them so very much. I love them more for understanding them so well. Please look at his sweet little feet, all wrapped around the wire like they're made of modeling clay!! I just want to smooch him right on the frost.

I call Frost "he" now because I watched him coming in alone to the feeder and ferrying loads of peanuts to what I assume was an incubating mate in mid-June. I don't think a female would have done that.

That's it for the animal update from Indigo Hill. More will be coming. There's so much going on here! and I'm so grateful to be able to witness it.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody. Good luck with your turkeys. I'm going to have to haul out my Bittman to make sure I do the stuffing right. I haven't gotten to cook many turkeys in my life, but by gum I'm cooking one tomorrow!