It’s a beautiful Sunday morning here. Not especially warm, at the moment, but a lot warmer than it was yesterday morning, when the day started off at a near-record low of 34 degrees. But it’s sunny out there, the sky is blue, everything else is green, the grass is cut and the weeds have been whacked so everything looks nice (which won’t last long), and as I write this, a young doe is strolling around in the yard outside my window.

This isn’t all that unusual (though since winter ended, they’ve typically stayed outside the fence), but this particular deer (well, I mean, I assume it’s the same one – she isn’t’ wearing a name tag or anything) has been hanging around here for several days now.

I got home from work Friday evening and saw her laying down in the tall grass in the shade just outside the fence. As I said, this isn’t all that unusual, so I didn’t think much of it, other than to make a note to make sure she was gone before I took the dogs over to that side of the house. She was there for quite a while, and at some point I saw her up and walking around, when I noticed her kind of nuzzling a couple of bunny rabbits, which seemed pretty strange because I’ve never seen a deer making friends with bunnies before.

Upon further review, I realized that these weren’t rabbits, but little baby deer. I didn’t want to get too close and scare them (plus it was really cloudy and dark out and nobody seems willing to buy me this 800mm lens), so I couldn’t get any really great pictures.

It’s hard to tell from that picture, but she’s pretty small, and they really were puppy-sized little buggers.

Anyhow, while I haven’t seen the kids since then, she’s been hanging around (alone, which seems unusual). Yesterday morning, I had the gate to the front yard open while I was outside weed whacking and hedge trimming, and she was hanging around watching the dogs bark at her. Then she started running up and down one side of the fence with the dogs while they chased her from the other side. When I approached, she’d wander away, but as soon as I went away, back she came to hang out with the dogs.

Eventually I got tired of listening to the dogs bark, so I brought them to the other side of the house and closed the gate. So naturally she came to the woods on that side and ran around with the dogs. I’m not sure if she’s looking for friends, or if something happened to her babies and she’s looking to adopt my dogs.

She was around all day yesterday, and of course back again this morning.

I hope your weekend is going well so far. Enjoy the rest of it, unless you’re on-call like my wife (and me, come to think of it), in which case, do the best you can.