Guess Who Came To Dinner

Usually the bucks around here stay over on the other side of the pond. Once in a while I might see them on our side down by the tractor barn, but not very often.

 

But for the past few days this guy has been stopping by the snack bar just outside our back door.

And no, he’s not grimacing at me, he’s just busy putting the first grind on the corn he’s scarfing up while totally ignoring the berry-scented deer-feed.

In this shot, taken with a 24mm wide-angle, you get an idea of how close he’s getting to me as I stand at my computer desk.

The one scarfing corn is the oldest, and ring-leader, of a little band of three bucks that have been hanging around together for the past month or so. And as such he’s either the only one allowed down on the corn or the only one with the balls to be enticed all the way down the encircling bank to get at it.

This one, the youngest, wouldn’t mind a bit of corn, but not enough to actually come down and get it.

But this guy, the middle one of the group, he’s going to pretend that I’m not standing there only a few feet away. In fact he’s going to pretend so hard that he won’t even look at me.

I was so focused on the bucks that I nearly missed the doe slipping by near the top of the hill with a fresh, new little one tagging along behind.

I asked them to wait up a moment while I framed the perfect shot, but mom, the same mom that brought last year’s little one down by the feeder about a year ago, was having none of that and with a quiet bleat had her little charge trotting into the tree-line where no camera can go.

< EDIT >

Little one in the highlighted area at the top of the cut-bank which was as close as she was going to get

About a week later mom came down to snarf some corn and deer-feed as she is wont to do, but this time the little one was tagging along instead of bedded down somewhere.