Not every thing has left.

Living in a Rock house, with walls about 18 inches thick makes it hard to monitor what goes on outside. The gate on the driveway is about 150 yards from the house, and we spend most of our time on the side of the house away from the driveway. It is impossible to hear a car drive in to the yard. We are about 1 & 3/4 of a mile from the road, and the house is not visible until you get committed coming over the hill from the pit. Various tourist, looking for a place to take a crap have a tendency to drive down our road, and there is no place to turn around until they get in the yard.

As you might  imagine in the spring and summer when it is comfortably warm, clothing is optional here, for the two of us. It is pretty hard to relax with the knowledge that the sight of my old wrinkled butt may cause some interesting stories among those who have a tendency to wander off the beaten path. So in the interest of privacy, and to keep the occasional starving Cow out of the yard unannounced, I put a couple of driveway alarms on the entrance.

Recently unexplained alarms at the gate have gone off at various times during the evening and night. When I have gone out to see what is causing the alarm, I have found nothing. No shiny eyes of Coyotes, Deer or anything at all. Finally getting tired of it, I put the trail cam on the post that the sensor is attached to. The above picture shows the culprits. I think Yogi and I will do a bit of hunting this evening.

It is also the time of the year when Deer pheromones began wafting through the air. The peak of the "Rut" for Deer is fast approaching. I put a picture on the last blog, of one of the local "boys" that normally live on the ranch below me on the creek. Some of the biggest Bucks that I have ever seen live there. These two guy's, although most hunters never kill anything bigger, are small fry. My guess is that they are about three years old, and a buck Deer doesn't reach maturity until about 7 or 8.

  This is the first one that hung around here for a while. Notice the two white spots on his neck. He is also a 3x3, and his horns are a little bit wider than his ears.

 This is the latest one.

 You can see the first flakes of the winter in the air.

Here is the latest one, and he is a 4x3. Only one white spot on his neck and his horns are no wider than his ears. The ears on a Mule Deer are about 18 inches wide. There are Deer further down the creek whose horns spread almost 30 inches wide. You nor I have the money to buy that tag from the rancher.

The recent rains and the bit of warm weather afterward sprouted the Cheat grass. The ranch below me needs all the natural feed he can get for his Cows, and he has dumped them out on this section of his ranch. The Cows mow it down as fast as it can grow, but this section is fenced off from them, and along with the tall Sage at the Creek, it is one of the better areas for a Doe that doesn't like crowds. There are generally about 30 or more Deer on his place feeding in the Alfalfa fields. The big boys will be fighting for the privilege of siring the next generation. Here, all they have to do is wait for the Doe that lives her to come into estrus.