Looking for Acorns

There isn't much food in the woods this time of year. The deer are used to finding acorns under the Oaks, but last fall the trees didn't produce.

Expect that the deer will move on to a high meadow further up the mountain in search of food.

Summer

Among the Ferns and Oaks

The woods belong to someone else. It was once an old farm...there is a cellar hole near the upper road. . I use these old roads on my walks. The trails aren't "posted," so I hope the owner doesn't mind my being there. Criss crossing the area are a maze of animal trails, and sometimes I will follow the fresh animal tracks, and set up my Trail Camera on one that looks especially well traveled. I notice this year, for the first time, that the hemlock trees are showing the effects of an infestation of the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid.  They are dropping needles at an alarming rate, and the older hemlocks are breaking off about 20 feet up the trunk. The woodland floor is littered with dead trees and branches. The Beech trees in the same area are also stressed, and the tops are breaking off in heavy winds.

I can't begin to imagine what these woods will look like in three or four years.  

Out of Hiding

Fawn Big Enough to Travel

Big Enough to Explore

The trail camera was able to capture this image because so many of the lower branches the surrounding Hemlock trees are infested with the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid.

Two June Visitors

We looked out our bedroom window this morning and saw two does standing on the lawn. They looked calmly out over the water, took a casual stroll around the garden, then wandered off through the ferns back into the woods.  In the 20 years we have been living here at "The Lake"  "full time," we never had deer in the front yard.  Once a Moose sloshed up out of the lake and stomped through the flower border. And a couple of winter-hungry "coy wolves" examined the compost.
 I like to think these lovely deer were paying us a social visit, but the logical explanation would be that something "unusually frightening " was prowling around "outside, over there, beyond the garden,"  in  their neck of the woods.