Two in One Day!

So the snow has come in fast and heavy and we are snowed in. We don't really mind as it doesn't change our daily lives much and it will probably melt by next week sometime. Besides! Writing this little blog keeps me busy! I have to tell you what happened to us the other day before the snow hit. We're pretty excited that a few of the moose stayed around and have been patiently waiting to get a glimpse of the deer we knew were hanging around.  About 2 pm Mountain Man decided he needed some tools from the shed so walked out to get them. I happened to glance out the window and noticed he was flashing a flashlight at me from inside the tool shed. OK... that's weird.  What does he want? Then he started waving the flashlight at me like crazy and I thought maybe he had lost his mind until I finally realized he wanted me to look at something. I looked up.. Ravens.... lots of ravens... looked around, nothing unusual there. Hmmm....  He was still waving like a mad man and at this point I was thinking of just ignoring him. I mean I didn't see anything! Finally I decided to take one more look and opened the window to lean out and see what the fuss was about. Wow! I couldn't believe it! I have never seen that many deer in one place! They were just around the side of the house which is why I couldn't see them out this window! Can you just picture me racing around to find my camera and change lenses? I must have looked like the crazy one this time!

There were so many I couldn't get them all in the picture! I snuck carefully outside and as quietly as possible started snapping pictures. I kept thinking my camera was clicking way too loud.

Whoops! Noticed!

I really wish I could have shown you a picture of the little deer. It was there, but the picture I took of it turned out too fuzzy. Finally Mountain Man got tired of sitting in the shed and started back to the house. Of course this time they noticed him and took off with their tails waving goodbye.

Our second incident didn't happen until evening when it was too dark to take pictures but still light enough so we could see what was going on. Thankfully there was also a full moon which gave off some light. Mountain Man had gone to the woodshed for some wood for the nights fire then went back out to turn off the generator. With the cloudy days we have been having it's been necessary to charge for about an hour or so in the evening. He wasn't being quiet or anything and didn't notice anything odd until his second trip outside.

Just after he shut off the generator (it's not noisy but still makes a lot of noise when you are used to the quiet) he looked up and received the shock of his life. There only about 125 yards away were what looked like a hundred elk staring at him! Many of them took off running and he felt the ground shaking with the force of it. Some of them took off into the trees but the majority of them stopped at about 300 yards, just beyond the yard site and my line of little fruit trees and started grazing again. From there we could watch them out the window. What a sight! I have never seen so many elk in one place before! We counted well over 40 but lost count as it was too dark further out to make out how many were there. There was one huge black elk which didn't eat at all but rather spent the whole time watching over the rest of them while they grazed. It was amazing to see and we watched them until we couldn't see them anymore. Sigh..... This place is amazing!

Making Tracks Too!

My post on Wednesday regarding the deer tracks made me realize I have to tell you about the other tracks we have. These ones however are a permanent fixture!

When we were building our house we decided we wanted nothing conventional and therefore have set out to be permanently different and slightly odd or unusual compared to most people we know.  Now I'm sure this idea is not unique as we can not possibly be the only ones to have done this, as even being slightly odd I'm sure there are others who are in our category.  But there I go again... digressing... seems to be a bad habit of mine.

By now you have probably guessed it anyway but I'll tell you just in case you didn't. We put animal tracks on the walls and ceilings of our house. Oh, not a lot of them really. Just a few in some unusual places to add a bit of character and be a source of conversation.

Elk tracks

Bear tracks. Mountain Man took some serious artistic license with these but I love them.

Goose tracks

Yesterday we decided to take a little drive to see if our family of deer has decided to stick around and we found a lot of tracks but no visual sightings. They are being very illusive and I don't blame them as we have resident coyotes and the other night I heard a wolf howl. We also found they had been very close to the house again and to give you a better perspective I place a quarter next to the itty bitty tracks I talked about on Wednesday.

So tiny!

We also discovered some very large rabbit tracks in the process. In comparison to the deer tracks this guy, or gal, is huge!

Tracks are so hard to take pictures of as the camera doesn't like to focus on them for some strange reason but look at that those! I didn't have a quarter in my pocket for this one but that is my camera lens cap which is  2 1/4 inches across sitting next to it. 

Well, I'm off to do some baking today. Scones, cookies, biscuits and pizza. Hmmm.... How am I going to manage not gaining weight this weekend?