young asparagus, February 2012
In early Spring when the asparagus was bursting up through the mulch at such an extraordinary rate, we toyed with the idea of setting up a time-lapse camera to capture the action and make one of those movies like we’ve seen from time to time–you know the kind: a flower bud opening, a bean sprouting…. Well, one thing led to another, and our research into a camera led us to a “trail camera.”
By the time we got the thing, the asparagus was pretty much played out. So we turned our amazement and curiosity to scoping out the animals. Who lives on this land or passes through? We’d seen the occasional deer and a couple of armadillos; we’d smelled a skunk. But, aside from birds and frogs and a lizard or two, that was all we knew of the wildlife here. What would the critter cam show us?
In the first few weeks, we saw lots of deer. A doe and her fawn grazing down among the wildflowers on the Meditation Walk. She visited quite frequently and spent a long time browsing the vegetation there. Then I moved the camera to the path from the house to the yurt. We always see evidence of deer there and a narrow deer trail branches off the path, so it seemed to be a good location. And it was! The camera captured quite a few videos of deer, and we’ll post those a little later on.
But then in late June I situated the camera in the recently cleared right-of-way under power lines. And look what the critter cam captured there!
Holy smokes! I couldn’t believe it! I’d never seen anything like these deer. I learned that they are axis deer, native to India!, imported to the US for hunting. Aren’t they beautiful!
They are more closely related to elk than to our native white-tail deer. There is no hunting season for axis deer and no permit required for hunting them. This might explain why we often hear shooting out-of-season off in the distance. But who’d want to kill such a lovely creature? They can have safe haven on our green acres.
