Went to check my mailbox.
Found these.
Fawn was still a bit wet on top of its back and yes behind the ears. It was walking clumsily, tentatively, and very very slowly.
Its mother (see background) was making soft “moo” / grunt noises. She was licking her nethers about every 5 minutes, and I saw blood, so my assumption here is this doe gave birth today.
They grow up and then they eat everything in sight.
In related news, my teenager graduated yesterday.
I’m amazed you got close enough to see all that! Whenever we get deer in our yard, they run at the slightest noise…
The deer here are ridiculously tame.
I sat in my car-which-seems-to-be-a-rolling-deerblind with my old iPhone, snapping a few and thinking about y’all at bOING.
My neighbors feed the deer–taming them further. Argh. Having deer nearby means ticks, chiggers, and so much more (coyotes, mountain lions–yes they are still around despite our location < 30 miles of Austin).
“Habitat shrinkage” (ranches are being turned into suburbs everywhere I look, it’s a boom without end apparently) contributes to the deer reasserting their presence in older neighborhoods like mine that are wooded, free of loud chainsaws and earth-moving equipment, and comparatively natural compared with the scalped-bare moonscapes that are required for Single Family Residential Housing developments.
I am told that several decades ago, the deer here were like yours
prior to all this Austin-centric hubbub.
Nowadays, by August, our deer are doing smash-and-grabs to survive our Texas summers. I have seen them jump 8-foot fences from a standing position, and pushing down welded wire fencing to eat trees (nearly any trees) that have not yet grown tall enough to have canopy above our local browse line (5 feet from ground level).
In central Texas, summer is our winter.
Congratulations to your teenager!
Yes, that town has gotten so crowded!
I looked through my phone camera photo’s and picked a few that may be interesting.
My colleague uses the same amount of coffee grounds to make the cup on the left, compared to my cup on the right:
This was the bike shed at a datacenter, inside a high security fence, so both these bikes are unlocked! One even has the key in the lock!
Now, this is a lobster tank!
Stolen from teh googles 'cause I’m not comfortable pulling over on that stretch of I-95, and the lobster is not visible from the street on the other side.
Think I’ll toss the rest of the loaf.
If you see any mold in your loaf you’re supposed to toss the whole thing since the rhysomes can be all through and invisible…but when they’re hidden…
We feed the deer at our house – just not on purpose (good grief, do the neighbors try to attract rats while they’re at it?). As of this week the hollyhock’s quickly disappearing, in spite of my spraying it with repellent. They went after the supposedly-resistant aster (and, a little bit of milkweed), as well. I’m guessing there’d been a drop-off in the deer population around here (suburban MD), because it had been an unusually long time since they’d helped themselves to whatever’s growing in our yard. Now they’re making up for lost time, it seems (or they’ve just finished multiplying)
Speaking as a formerly pregnant and formerly lactacting large-ish mammal, I can say that anyone who as been in the position of feeding sucklings/offspring all the time will recognize hunger and thirst x10^23 for what it is.
We only get to have nice things if we surround them with welded wire fence and stake them with metal T-stakes at 3 points anchored to the earth.
It is obvious to me that our red-tail and red-shoulder hawks are thrilled to have a reliable area to hunt fruitfully.
Carve off the bad bits, put it in the toaster, medium, you’re good to go.
Hasn’t affected me or my family a bit!
Honestly, we do it all the time. OTOH, our food budget is extremely onerous and I simply will not throw out organic food that I can’t rebake into bread pudding
or toast or turn into croutons
or whatever.
Yikes!
Ok.
Sorry!
I am pretty sure I must be not so healthy now. I wonder what this does to a human body, longterm, eating questionably edited moldy bread. Either that, or now I have super powers.
Thanks for posting. I stand corrected.
I think the answer is “You can probably get away with it the vast majority of the time. When you can’t, problemo.”
It’s treatable now, but this always comes time mind with cereal fungi:
Ignoring the fact that I seek out cereal fungi on maize. In fact, I like it a great deal more than maize itself.
My parents (mother) makes sure open feed bag is always available for deer during the winter, on the island they reside. Peaceful/sanctuary feed trove during winter for pregnant deer.
