Water Dish Visitors

The game camera caught some nice shots of visitors to our wildlife water dish recently. The game camera doesn't seem to bother the animals although I think some of them do notice it, because they appear to look right at at.

In any case, I enjoy retrieving the image card every week and the Christmas-morning anticipation of looking through the typically hundreds of images to see what we caught.

First is a nice white-tailed (Odocoileus virginianus) doe. She looks young to me, but I'm certainly no expert. Speaking just from what I've observed over the last few years, the older does appear heavier than this one. This one looks sleek and graceful.

Next is a young white-tailed buck. You can see his fuzzy antlers coming in. They're covered in velvet which is a living skin-like tissue which provides the growing antlers with blood, oxygen, and nutrients. The antler starts as cartilage and becomes mineralized. Once the antler is full-size, the velvet sheds and the antler bone dies. Male deer re-grow their antlers every year. We frequently find discarded ones on our property. Interestingly, about 1 in 10,000 females have antlers and this is usually associated with hermaphroditism.

Lastly, we caught an elusive gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) in daytime. This photo was taken at 4 pm. We've caught gray foxes before but always when it was dark. They're nocturnal and very shy. It's a rare treat to see one in person.