On a dark morning, fall colors that seemed bland yesterday are bright embers. Behind the still-green lilac, a deer’s pale legs.
deer
Friday October 08, 2021
Fog at sunrise. A doe leads her two grown fawns to the wild apple tree—an exuberant clatter of hooves.
Sunday August 29, 2021
Almost fall. The motherless fawn running out of the woods has lost its spots but not its cloud of flies.
Wednesday July 28, 2021
This year for the first time deer have not eaten all the bracken in my yard. One frond is already yellowing like the skeleton of some unlikely fish.
Thursday July 15, 2021
Sunrise. A snort from the deer who sleeps under the crabapple tree. A hummingbird zips past the wild garlic.
Friday July 02, 2021
Overcast and cool. A clatter of hooves on moss as a half-grown fawn runs past, just inside the woods’ edge. The distant ringing of a phone.
Tuesday June 22, 2021
A doe picks her way through the rain-soaked meadow, fawn scrambling along behind. A cerulean warbler’s ascending song.
Saturday June 05, 2021
Venus in the dawn sky. Phoebe, field sparrow, wood pewee. The alarm-snorts of a deer.
Friday September 25, 2020
Thin fog at sunrise. Four deer in the yard ignore me only to stamp and snort at a small black cat.
Thursday September 17, 2020
Dawn. Two wrens rustle awake inside the old hornets’ nest. A doe and her nearly grown fawn graze in the yard.
Sunday May 31, 2020
Gloriously cool and sunny. A doe grazing at the other end of the yard stiffens and cocks her ears at a crow call—a sure sign she has a fawn.
Thursday May 16, 2019
A scraggly-looking doe, still in her gray winter pelt, crosses the stream below the house, pausing to graze on a multiflora rose.
Sunday February 03, 2019
Patches of bare yard dug up by deer. Patches of blue sky which the sun now and then pops through. The drip drip of meltwater from the roof.
Tuesday January 15, 2019
Wandering tracks of sparrows and juncos in the snow below the porch. Beyond that, bare patches pawed open by hungry deer in the night.