Where the deer and the antelope (make that jackrabbits) play........

Baby Bixby

We have a new grandbaby in our family! Lucky number 7. Number 8, counting one great-grandson; but Anthony Jr has his own special category! Bixby comes 14 years after the last grandchild so he will be sort of a “stand alone” grandchild for our family. Much in the same way his mom was, being born 12 years after her youngest brother. Both of her brothers were gone from home by the time she was in first grade.  She came to us at a different time in our lives.    

When her brothers Larry and John were small, my siblings and I were very young ourselves, most of us still in our teens. The boys grew up in a rowdy rambunctious family, full of numerous cousins their age and grandparents and great-grandparents and aunts and uncles and great-aunts and great-uncles. Every holiday was a family gathering, overflowing with family and friends who congregated at our parents’ house.  Makeshift tables were set up all over the house. One year my mom even took her bed down to set up a table in her bedroom.  

Kids were everywhere. We are a large family. Someone always had a baby in their lap as they ate. Babies were passed around the table, giving the moms a chance to eat with both hands and to drink iced tea that did not have baby slobber in it! Older cousins took the younger ones under their wing, pushing them in cardboard boxes around and around the circle of the living room, dining room, and kitchen in my mom’s house. My dad headed outside after we ate, trailed by a crowd of grandkids, all making noise at the top of their lungs. My sisters and I stayed inside to clean up a restaurant-size kitchen mess, glad to have the time to ourselves without a little hand pulling on our shirt wanting something. Even if we had to do dishes to get that reprieve.

It was truly a village raising a kid, back before that became the overused phrase of the day.

But it is a changed family world that Bixby enters. On my daughter’s side of the family, things have changed a lot. My parents are gone, as are her great-grandparents. Sarah has only one grandmother now and she lives a couple of states away. Sarah lives in a different town than either of her brothers.  Some of Bixby’s cousins are grown, and his oldest cousin Anthony has a young son of his own.  Family dynamics have changed and it is hard to get the whole family together. Extra-curricular activities take up most of the free time of the school-age grandkids. Disagreements about politics and opinions seem to matter more than they did when my siblings and I were young parents. Or most likely we needed each other more and had so many problems we stayed away from those things. Our little cabin is several hours drive from most of the family and should everyone come to visit at the same time, we don’t all have a place to sleep and have to overflow into motel rooms. All these things conspire against having the big family gatherings we used to have.

But before I drift off into what Bixby won’t have, I want to say what he will have. He comes to us when our lives are more settled. His Pampaw is still working but his Mamaw (that’s me!) is retired. We have a place in the Hill Country that we refer to as “the ranch” even though by West Texas standards, that is laughable. But, hey, by Hollywood standards, it is a ranch, being the same size as Tom Selleck’s  “ranch”. My son-in-law has already promised me that we can have Bix to ourselves for a week every summer. And I intend to make a ranch hand of him. He may not want to be; he may grow up to be a city boy at heart and love concrete and loud noises, but I have hopes for him!

I look into his sweet little face and I wonder if he will like the ranch. Will he want to know how to be an organic farmer like his Pampaw? Will he get up every morning anxious to go feed Gus and Woodrow? Will he learn to watch the sky for rain and to wait for that first north wind each fall? Will he like going to the feed store and will he want to know what type feed and hay to buy? Will he watch the whitetail fawns appear each summer and understand that the bucks lose their antlers each year and they grow back covered with velvet? Will he love the wild Rio Grande turkeys that are my favorites? Will he like helping me with stone and carpenter projects? Will he learn the difference between a mesquite and a live oak and a cedar elm? Will he know that the mesquites in the hills often grow along a ridge of caliche and if you need caliche for your driveway, this is the place to look for it? Will he want Pampaw to teach him to hunt and how to process a deer he has harvested? Will he understand his part in providing for the wildlife with water and supplemental feed? Will he learn the different footprints they all make and will he be able to tell what animal was here by looking at their poop? Will he learn to talk to the ravens and that the buzzards will come to the yard when you throw bacon grease out? Will he understand that you have to manage the land and do your part to preserve it? Will he see the need for rainwater harvesting? Will he understand that we don’t own the land, it owns us?

Will he love to breathe in the smell of caliche and cedar? And will he come to need this smell like he needs food and water, just to stay alive? Just like his Mamaw does.

Some earlier ranch hands: grandson Zac ready to go hunting and grandson Jeremy helps burn brush.

Meanwhile back at the ranch.......

Looking out the window I see a doe with her little fawn wander by. Inside the yard fence. Good grief! How did that fawn get in the fence and will he remember so he can get out? They head for the other side of the yard where mom jumps the fence to get into the longhorns’ pen. This is the most popular eatery this time of day, with leftover alfalfa hay being the main attraction. 


Mom hops over the fence into the pen leaving the fawn in the yard. No problem there, he just hangs out. But then it’s closing time at the alfalfa buffet. The fawn starts to realize the predicament he is in. Mom’s over there and he’s over here and he can’t jump that high. Hmmm. What to do. As all the other whitetails head out of the pen, she comes back up to the fence and he goes over to her. They exchange an unspoken communication. He begins to look for a way out of the yard. She goes out of the pen by another open gate and circles around to be outside the yard fence.

He paces all along the fence. There are places on each side of the driveway gate that even I could crawl through to get outside. He goes back and forth past these but doesn’t seem to understand he can get out that way. He goes on around the fence and passes another large hole under the fence, one I enlarged last year by moving some rocks so the little deer could get through. He passes a walk-through gate. I leave the chain on the gate loose so the fawns can squeeze through. I figured this was how he got in in the first place but if it was he has no recollection of it. 

Mom waits for baby

His mom stays with him for the next hour and a half waiting patiently for him to figure out something. I watch the whole time. It’s always the best policy not to interfere with does and their fawns. They have their own way of doing things and usually work it out ok. But it’s starting to get dark and I’m beginning to wonder if he will ever figure it out. So when he heads along the back fence, I go outside and open wide the walk-through gate. The mom sees me and doesn’t run off. We have an unspoken communication also. 


The fawn sees me and gets a little edgy and runs away a little bit. I circle around the cabin to herd him back toward the gate. He runs right past the wide open gate. I am losing hope that he will live to grow up if he doesn‘t get a little wiser. He goes back to the front near the driveway gate. 


I go up on the front porch and figure I’ll leave the gate open and sooner or later he will realize he can walk through it. But it stresses him a bit that I am on the porch and he makes a wild and fast dive under the fence and rejoins his mom. She turns to me and gives me a last look as they walk off together. 


He is a beautiful little fawn and she is a good mom. Texas Parks and Wildlife has said that many does are walking away from their fawns this year in order to save themselves. And when I look at the thin bodies of the moms that live here, I can understand it. I believe we have lost one twin here already. I see two moms with single fawns.
We do have a new set of twins here. Their mom is the little “yard deer” who since last year always hung out close to the cabin and wasn‘t quick to run off. These are her first babies. They were born a few weeks ago; later than any other fawns we have seen. She keeps them right with her.

I went to the feed store yesterday to get a couple of deer blocks for her. I confessed to the feed store owner that I am breaking down and trying to keep one of the moms alive. It’s a road that once you start down, it’s hard to get off and it is a losing cause more often than not. He tells me that I’m not the only one; he has other customers, some in town, that are doing the same thing.


She ate a good chunk of the deer block yesterday. Tonight there are two other bully does fighting each other over the block. They don’t have babies. The yard deer is in the longhorns’ pen eating cedar leaves, her tiny babies at her side. This is a last resort for starving deer. Once the bully does leave she will come into the yard and eat on the deer block. Maybe this and the extra corn I put out for her and the alfalfa the longhorns leave will be enough to help her and her babies survive. And maybe not.


This part of the state has way more deer than it can support even when conditions are good. The whitetail here are always small. If only the strong would survive, there would still be plenty of whitetails. I’ve known the way of nature since I was a child. 

But when nature is your close neighbor and you watch the same animals each day it’s not always easy to remain neutral. Sometimes you have to try to give the underdog a little advantage and hope it tips the scales for them. 


And that’s a good policy for people too. 

You Get A Line, I'll Get A Pole......

Daddy drove the car down the gravel road, the deep, loose gravel crunching under the tires. The tall trees hugged the side of the road leaving a thin slice of sky above us. We went deeper and deeper into the woods. I was starting to feel claustrophobic, although I didn’t know what that word meant at the time.


We weren’t sure where we were going or when we would get there. Daddy was taking us to a friend’s camp house on Horseshoe Lake in Louisiana. We would fish and spend the night there.


My memories of this trip are blurry. I’m not sure how old I was. But there are a few things that stand out in my mind, all of them creepy! 


The camp house had a wooden deck on the side near the lake. You had to walk out onto the deck to get to the bathroom. I remember I had to get up during the night to use the bathroom. It’s not clear in my memory if it was an outhouse or if it was just outside the house. 


As I walked down the deck I looked out at the lake. A bright moon shone and the lake was covered with duckweed in places, or “alligator water” as we called it then. And sure enough, there were what seemed like hundreds of pairs of alligator eyes floating on the surface of the water. The moonlight reflected off their eyes. The Spanish moss hung from the trees. A mist rose from the lake. I can see it even today in my mind. It was horrifying and beautiful.


I began to question whether I could “hold it” until morning, or did I really have to use the bathroom!


Earlier in the day we kids took a walk through the woods. We had gone a good ways from the camp house when we heard grunting and snorting noises. We stopped and looked at each other. A group of large wild hogs entered the open area where we were. Yikes! Time to make a hasty retreat. We ran in fear for our lives! We made it back to the camp house with everyone accounted for. 


Daddy used to love to fish. He often took us to scary “dangerous” places to fish. The boys were taught to cast and fish for bass. For some reason we girls only used cane poles and fished for bream. I guess he thought we couldn’t grasp the complexities of casting or maybe we didn’t show an interest. When I was grown up I wished that I had gotten to bass fish as it seemed like more fun and had more action.

Sometimes Daddy would take us out in the jon boat. We never had any other kind of boat that I remember. One time Kathy and I went out in a boat by ourselves and we had trouble trying to get back to shore. We only had paddles, which was ok since we didn’t know how to use an outboard motor, or any kind of motor for that matter. We kept paddling against each other and going in circles. Daddy stood on the shore and gave us instructions and waved his arms a lot, and we made it safely in but it was touch and go for a while!

I used to think I liked to fish. When people asked I said, sure, I love to fish! But when I went as an adult I found it boring. I had no patience for it. I wondered if I had gotten tired of it. I reluctantly admitted that I didn’t really like fishing. 


One day it dawned on me that it wasn’t the fishing I had liked, it was being with Daddy. In spite of the horrific places we went to and the phobias that I acquired from those places, I loved being out with Daddy. He would take me out in the boat and teach me how to put worms and shiners on my hook and how to gently take the hook out of the fish‘s mouth. When we got back with the bream, he taught me how to use a spoon to scrap the fish scales off, and how to cut the heads off and gut the fish. I asked him one time if it hurt the fish and he said, no, they didn’t have any feelings. I never have researched to see if fish have feelings, but I believed Daddy when he told me they didn’t. Because who wants to cut something's head off and know they are feeling it.


Mama would fry up the fish we caught. The bass were filleted but the bream were fried whole. If you were too little someone had to mash up your bream and remove all the bones before you could eat them. It was a tedious chore but we did it with patience, rubbing the meat between our fingers until it was so shredded there was no place for a bone to hide. We must have been good at it because no one ever choked to death on a fishbone!

Daddy has been gone for 6 years and we lost Mama a few months ago. We continue to have fish fries with the family gathered together. My brother Andy is the supplier of fish. He switched from bass fishing to saltwater fishing many years ago and always has a freezer of redfish and trout. He brings his equipment and fries them up outside, usually at my sister Kathy’s house or my brother Lee’s house. Those of us that can make it come and bring side dishes and desserts. He takes requests for fish fries, as he did for my daughter Sarah’s wedding shower and Kathy’s 60th birthday party. As we did growing up, the cousins join us when they can.


(Photos - Granddaughters Natalie and Lexi)

Our grandchildren don’t know about the fish fries we had growing up, when we would all catch fish for supper, and clean them when we were no bigger than the littlest of the kids now. And go out in the boat with our dad and learn how to fish. But my children have taught their children to fish. And the girls how to cast. And I hear tell they’ve even been to some pretty creepy camp houses to develop their own phobias. 






This website has a list of alligator eyes at night. You get the idea!
http://www.johnmoranphoto.com/fauna_001.html

Here's Your Sign!

I finally got the signs made for our outbuildings. Have been putting it off hoping my niece Esther would come by and I could talk her into doing it! She is the best sign maker! Mine are not the best, but at least we can direct someone to a building easier.

Used an old garden tool and iron star on this one. Hung it from an old green faucet handle.


The plow share and pitchfork came from Rickie's family place in Mississippi.

The pump house is the only building my husband lets me get close to with a bucket of paint! It is colorful. A couple of years of living in San Antonio and I was in love with the bright Fiesta colors! 


Attached a couple of old faucet handles and an old nozzle to the sign.








(Photo - pump house before the sign was added)

This was one of the first tools my husband bought many many years ago. 


I threw a handful of caliche dust on the signs to instantly age them. Haha! 

Cheaper Than Therapy

Rickie and I debated out loud the debate we have each been having in our heads. Is the harvest from our small garden worth the water and the time we expend on it?

On paper, no, it’s not. It’s so dry and even with our watering, the plants are not producing like they should. A late freeze damaged our tomato plants and we had to replant. It was by then too hot and we only got a couple of tomatoes before we had to pull them up. 

The few grapes we had this year were all eaten by the birds. We normally cover them with a net but there were so few this year we decided the birds needed them worse than we did.

We did get some good squash, onions, and some Crawford lettuce that was super! The birds are eating the new shoots and blooms on the pepper plants, which they have never done before. Rickie covered them with a net this weekend. We have a few watermelons that should be ripe soon and an early pumpkin that is turning orange. The other pumpkin plants and butternut squash plants are doing well.


Last year we had the best peach crop ever. This year we didn’t have a single peach. The two oldest peach trees are so stressed we may lose them. 


The fruit trees and vegetables and herbs are on a drip system that waters them every night at 2 am. It’s a very slow drip on our well and really only keeps them alive; they need supplemental watering or rain to prosper. 


There is the very real possibility that our well will run dry if we don’t get rain soon.  We live in a semi-dry area that normally gets about 25 inches of rain a year. We have had 6.9 inches since last July 4th. And getting out there on these 100+ degree days takes a toll on us.

We wondered aloud if we should pull up the garden this year and start again next year. We considered that maybe we should have directed all the water to the two old peach trees and let the few drought tolerant plants we have in the yard fight it out with nature on their own. We do have a rainwater harvesting system and it has been about half full twice this year so we have used that as long as it lasted.

The same debate was talked out about whether we should have gotten rid of the longhorns. Financially, that is an easy one. Of course, any reasonable person would have sold them months ago. We have been feeding them during this drought for a year now. There is not a blade of green grass for them to eat. Feed, coastal Bermuda hay, and alfalfa hay have gone up in price with the drought that extends outside our state.

But there is a harvest from the garden that can’t be calculated in terms of dollars and time spent. This morning I turned the news on as I drank my coffee. There was a high ranking church official being replaced because he helped cover up child abuse in the church. A media mogul, owner of newspapers and a major television network, is under investigation for his company hacking into the phone of a murdered girl, giving her parents false hope she was still alive, and bribing police officials. Politicians are acting like two years olds and won’t grow up and accept their responsibilities. Instead they stomp their feet and pout and call each other names while the military, retirees, and government and school employees worry whether they will get a check they earned so they can feed their families and pay their bills.


It turns a naturally optimistic and happy person into a tormented and angry human being. It makes me want to scream and smack someone! 

But I don’t have time for that. The garden needs watering and the longhorns need feeding. And that is where the true worth of them comes into play. It doesn’t take long working outside and caring for things until my mood is back to normal. I marvel at how things grow from tiny seeds and how they smell and the colors of them. I smile at Woodrow and Gus as they see me coming and stick their heads over the fence waiting for me to fill up the feed buckets. They have a routine too and after they eat they head for the shade of the cedar trees to just chill out.


Rickie and I come from a long line of farmers, loggers, small yard gardeners, and caretakers of animals. It is bred into us and taught to us to put our hands in the dirt and to care for living things. These are all part of living in the country, although we have had a small garden in most every place we have lived. They add a value to our lives that can’t be measured in money. They soothe our souls and keep us grounded in a crazy world that we have no control over. 

Mamow's Little Pitcher

When I was a little girl we lived in a duplex house with my grandparents on one side and us on the other. I spent a lot of time on my grandparents' side of the house. Mamow had a little glass pitcher in her fridge that she kept water in. It always had that refrigerator taste to the water, but I loved the little pitcher. It had a star design on the bottom.

I don't know what ever happened to hers but I looked for one like it for years every time I would go into an antique store. Once it was in a Kellogg's commercial with Tony the Tiger. I wrote to Kellogg asking where they got it, hoping I could order one. Surprisingly, they did reply to me and told me they used an ad agency and it was one of the agency's props and no one knew where it came from.

I finally found one after years of searching. It made the move to the little cabin as we have downsized. I don't keep water in it in the fridge but I always have that taste of cold refrigerator water in my mouth every time I see it or use it! And memories of my Mamow.

AND HIS MAMA CRIED.......

The last rain we had was over a month ago and that was only one tenth of an inch. We are in a record-breaking drought. The grass is not only dead, it is disintegrating and the yard and pasture has spots of powdery dirt where native buffalo grass grew before.


(Photo - triplet fawns from several years ago)

Deer are not really grass eaters; they eat the little “herbs and forbs” that grow in with the grass. Those things we call “weeds”. They are non-existent right now. They will also eat the young soft leaves of the oak trees. Most of our live oaks do not have many leaves, if any, this year. They dropped the old leaves like they do in early Spring each year but there was no rain so they didn’t leaf out completely. They fight for their survival by doing this. They never bloomed so there will be no acorns this fall, the food the deer depend on most to survive the winter.

I have two tiny native mesquite trees in a planting bed in the yard. They have been between 1 – 2 feet tall for years because the deer eat them as soon as they get any new leaves. I should just let them die but when I water the plants in that bed I water them so that the deer will have a tiny bite of something green.  One bite won’t keep anything alive, but I do it anyway because I can’t not do it.

We have been feeding our two longhorns for 11 months straight now as the grass died early last August and we have not had any since then. They only have what we feed them, although earlier when the little white oaks were leafing out they nibbled on them. All over the property you can see broken cedar branches where they have gone up under trees to get the last of the green grass that grows there.

We throw a bucket of corn out every day for the deer. It is only a treat as there is not enough nutrition in it to keep them alive and there are about 8 to 12 deer that come out to eat it.

We have more birds this year than ever and we feed them at 4 stations. We feed milo to the many Rio Grande turkeys we have. They come into the yard every day for water and to eat any birdseed on the ground. The turkeys have not had any babies this year and the hens have already regrouped together like they do when they are not nesting or raising their babies. Nature at work again keeping the eggs from hatching. A little moisture is needed to keep the eggs viable, and there has not been any, not even in the humidity, or lack of.

We have 3 water troughs and they draw the wildlife in. Years ago we noticed that an armadillo could not reach the water so we added a stone step so that the short animals could get to it. We have watched them climb up on it to get to the life-sustaining water.

(Photo - the tall grass from several years ago is gone now)

We put leftover lettuce and greens out for a little cottontail that lives somewhere close. A few times we turned the sprinkler on a little area of the yard hoping to green the grass up so the cottontail and the jackrabbits would have some green to eat. But we are on a well and it is a drought so we have to be careful with the water. When I am watering the garden and the couple of xeriscaped planting beds I have I spray some on the buffalo grass by the garden gate hoping to keep it alive until we get rain so that  it doesn’t disappear entirely.

We have seen several pregnant does this year. Most have aborted the babies already. When conditions are so dry and inhospitable to life this is Nature’s way of keeping the mother alive for another year. 

(Photo -  Doe and fawn from a year when grass was high)

Last night I was looking out the front window and a mother with newborn twins came out of the wooded area by where we throw the corn out. The twins had just been born. They were so tiny and she was still licking them to clean them from the birth. They walked on wobbly legs and one even broke into a little run. They were beautiful. The mother looked weak and her legs seemed to wobble more than the fawns. She kept the babies by the protection of the trees.

I marveled at the wonder of birth and my heart soared to see that she had triumphed over Nature’s harsh practicality and had kept and delivered her babies.  And at the same time I cried to think of the prospects she and her babies had. Odds are that she won’t have any milk and the babies will die before they even get a chance to live. Or she will starve to death as the babies drain every bit of nourishment she manages to take in. Then the babies will die of starvation. If they can make it to the weaning stage, which is months away, and she dies, another doe will usually allow them to hang around her and she will help protect them from predators.

This morning I looked out the kitchen window and the little doe that hangs around the yard a lot was browsing trying to find some plants to eat, even if they were dead. A tiny pine siskin bird was at her heels following every step and turn she made, hoping she stirred up a tiny bug or two. It looks like the little yard deer is pregnant still. Her hide is darker than most of the other does and last year she stayed in the yard a lot, not running off very far when we went outside.  She knows to go behind the hay shed and see if there is any alfalfa on the ground from the bales we feed the longhorns and that is where she was headed.

And if there’s one thing that she don’t need, it’s another little hungry mouth to feed………..

I will be watching to see if we have another little fawn soon. This would be her first baby. The odds will be against this baby also. But sometimes, even against all odds, life survives. And the moms will fight against Nature and against every hardship that comes to their babies. And sometimes they will die so that their babies might live. They don’t do this as we might, by thinking about it. The gift or burden of reason is not theirs. They do it instinctively and never give it a thought.

I am cheering you on, moms and babies. 

And I’ll throw out a little more corn and drop a little more alfalfa behind the hay shed.