Wild Life

I've had ample opportunity to photograph the wildlife around my mom's place and the places we are visiting. We went to the Big Obsidian Flow one day and these butterflies filled the air.

Mario caught one for me so I could photograph it and we could figure out what it was. We were suspecting it wasn't good and we were right. It is a Pine Butterfly and they are causing defoliation problems here in the PacNW.

Then we pulled over for me to get some photos of the mountains and to try out my new camera. Apparently when we did this we disturbed this badger.

I whistled and got it to look up.

Totally makes me think of the line from UHF, "Badger? Badger? We don't need no stinkin' badger!" (An obvious homage to Treasure of the Sierra Madre which I've also seen).

My mom lives in a forested area and has a swampy meadow sort of area for a backyard. Not much of a place to stand so she and one of her brothers built a wide deck that makes a great place to watch the deer.

There are two doe that frequent the area with their twins. I don't know what the statistics are but two doe with twins seems unusual to me.

These fawns though! Sooooooo cute!

We went for a boat ride and I caught the tail end (no pun intended) of some geese taking off from the water.

We came back from the boat trip and hello! Look who is lounging in the back yard!

Gorgeous. Also tasty but these deer are not for eating. :)

As I sat on the deck this THING kept trying to land on me.

I've since identified him as a pine beetle. Next time we meet pal you are going to meet the bottom of my shoe.

Enough with the creepy thing - back to the cute!
They were curious about the pond/fountain.

So cute and fuzzy that I admit to a moderate amount of squealing when they do things like get hyper and jump and prance around the yard.

I stole - okay I seriously just typed "stold." I would make a disparaging remark about the area, the number of teeth I have and my new IQ but I won't. ;)

So I stole my post title from a book title by Molly Gloss which I will be reading quite soon. I ended up with one of her books since we both share the awesome name and have now collected three. This will be my first time reading them though.