Dragonfly
I feel like my brain is trying to crawl out behind my eyeball. The left one. It hurts. And in other news...

Yeah, there's no news here. I have absolutely nothing to write about. I plotted a new book and by "plot," I mean I wrote a short & dirty numbered list of what happens. The end. I'm trying to figure out now if I really want to write this one or not. I mean, it's good, but it's not blowing my socks off or anything.

I wonder how often this happens to other people. Or if I'm broken in some way.

Oh, I do have news. A short little tidbit of a story, really. The other night --eh, 2am-ish -- I was just shutting everything down to go to bed when I heard a righteous crash on my front porch. Considering what happened previously, I ran to the door and made sure it was locked. It was. So then I finally convinced myself to look out the window (because I STILL have issues with this at night), saw Moose's food bowl tilted over, and then spied...

... a freaking BIG-ASS DEER running around my driveway.

Yes folks, we had a deer ON our porch eating dog food and, most likely, the sound of me walking around and shutting everything off spooked it. Now some are going to think this is funny. I'm not so much with the humor here, and I'll tell you why:

1) We are in a bit of a drought here but not so much the deer should be scamming on my rosebushes and now dog food. This, along with visual confirmation leads me to believe,

2) We have TOO MANY deer in our current population. That would be due to,

3) not having hunted in a few years now, PLUS, a lot of bulldozing on lands surrounding us - interfering with their habitat. We still have quite a bit of untouched land, as does C-Boy behind us... so they've moved in.

4) We have not hunted, in part, because of the bulldozed land having opened things up around us too much to safely shoot a bullet. AND Mr. Clean has not bothered with his bow. Why?

5) Because those darn deer let us walk up within about 10 feet of them. They've made friends with the diva horse and regularly share pasture with her as though they are a herd of cows.

Here's the real problem... When you get a large population of deer in a small area, there is a very REAL chance of disease. It's just like people... pack them in and someone is bound to get sick, which then spreads to everyone else. Additionally, they can carry Lyme disease due to the deer ticks. And then there's the whole deforestation going on, from their eating habits. All that grows is what they can't eat (and while those plants are usually native to the environment, they previously only constituted a small percentage of what grew). Lastly, when you get that many in an area near a major road, the incidences of them running out into traffic greatly increase. (I can't tell you how many times in the past year, I've come very, VERY close to hitting one on the way home... not at night... at 4pm or 2pm or 8pm.)

On the flip side, how do you hunt something that lets you walk up to it? Conundrum. Because, you know what? Venison is GOOD. Free meat is ESPECIALLY good, given the current cost of feeding a family.

So. Unfortunately, I think we're going to have to hunt this year.









Labels: | edit post
0 Responses