Farm Fresh Blog

My aircard died before we went to the north ranch a couple of weeks ago and so I'd been living on my iphone for internet until yesterday, when my husband and the AT&T salesman dragged me further along the road to technology with a new - Hotspot!

I am now, back in 'bidness!'

So let's catch up on the latest at the ranch. One of my favorite parts of the ranch is best seen from a game camera. I love game cameras. They are a wonderful way to keep tabs of the wildlife on the ranch. (and your cows - I firmly believe that as soon as a deer feeder goes off, no matter where she is on the property, Dancing Cow races like Secretariat through the forest to scoop up deer corn.)

There is a good side and a bad side to game cameras. First of all, they give you a snapshot of your wildlife . . .

 I love turkeys. We have a lot of them and they leave feathers all over the ranch. I delight every time I find a feather. It's like finding a smile, just layin' there on the ground.

And deer, we have a 4-6 does that I see each morning or afternoon when I roll around on the 4wheeler. The game camera allows me to slow the action down and look at them more closely.

 (dates on camera are incorrect)

And bucks. They only come out at night and are almost always at the feeder with the rascally little raccoons. We have one little raccoon that is so obese that I call him Fat Albert. This coon isn't pregnant, it is OBESE. The coons are eating pretty well around here. This raccoon in the photo isn't Fat Albert. I don't have his/her pictures on this laptop. I saw Albert running one day when I was on the 4wheeler. Fat Albert was so fat that I thought he was bear cub when he climbed that tree!

 And naturally, the game cameras allow us to keep loose tabs on the hog population. Yes, they're still here. Yes, I still carry a gun when I walk. Yes, when I walk I take one of those evil assault rifles.  (for more on that read this:  Assault Rifles)

 Game cameras are nice, but . . . they also allow you to get to know the animals, and that isn't always a good thing for the men in the family who put up game cameras to monitor wildlife for hunting purposes. Depending upon the womenfolk in the family, this can work against them. For instance, we have a nice population of does, but we also have one  'grandma' doe. She is obviously older and the men took one look at her picture and proclaimed,

"Oh, she needs to be weeded out."

I took one look at her and announced,

"NO! She is a grandma! You can't shoot GRANDMA!"

Thus you see the problem with game cameras. Gentlemen, game cameras allow your spouse to get to know the little creatures under her care. And as such, she is inclined to make sweeping proclaimations such as,

"There will be NO killing of Grandma Deer!"

The men argue about the good of the deer population and such, but I hear them much like Charlie Brown's teacher - "waa waaa waaa waaaaaaaa."

And so, if one of these boys shoots Grandma, there will be hell to pay around here.

 "Such is the danger of cameras."