Continuing with the “photographed in my backyard” theme from last week, I’m super excited to share some more images that I’ve captured here at the house.  I’ve got a number of images I want to share, so this week I’ll just start at the beginning. BABIES!

It’s quite common to see wildlife around the house.  Most often it’s turkeys, but deer regularly pass through, and occasionally we’ll see coyotes.  On three separate occasions we’ve had a bear come through and wreck our bird feeders.  When we first moved in we had a groundhog that hung around, which we named Pearl.  Pearl had babies, and so we’d randomly see her and her babies in the backyard.  We have also seen baby turkeys over the years, and on one other occasion we saw a fawn, but it never got close enough to house for me to photograph it (we’d catch a glimpse of it running off). 

Well this year has been quite the spectacle.  At the beginning of the summer we had three turkeys, each with six babies each.  The hens would hang around with each other and walk those babies all the way around our house.  It was so adorable.  Another hen showed up with four babies, but she never hung around the other three.  One evening we were getting ready for dinner and we had been discussing all the little babies, and had even said we’d love to see a baby deer here some time.  It wasn’t 10 minutes later and I looked out the window to see a doe walking out of the tall grass… and then the tiniest head appeared.  I literally gasped, and whispered to Holly – “look! A baby!!”  The fawn was absolutely tiny and was even still wobbly on it’s legs, which means it was just about 24 hours or less old.  I of course ran and got my camera.  I made a little too much noise with the blinds on our window, which spooked the mom – she ran into the tall grass, and the baby dropped where it was and tried its best to hide where it was.  After a few minutes, the fawn got up and started looking around for mom, which is when I captured the image above of the baby looking one way, and mom looking the other.

Over the past two months I’ve had the chance to photograph it multiple times, and we’ve gotten to enjoy seeing it run all around.  It’s a lot bigger now – but that will be next week’s Picture of the Week!

Dan

–Dan Thompson