After chores this morning, I armed myself to launch an attack on the noxious weeds. This is an ongoing war; new recruits emerge, and seasoned soldiers that escaped detection in earlier battles are now locked and loaded:
It is essential to take them down before those flowers turn to seed heads! (If only the owner of the logged lot to our north would do the same; grrr....)
I worked my way through the upper pasture until I got near where that ewe was bedded down yesterday morning. A movement at the fenceline caught my ewe;
a fawn was caught!
I ran up to see if I could free it, but realized that the job was going to require wire cutters. I sprinted to the garage and back while my mind sprinted through the hints I'd gotten over too many days indicating that this fawn had been trapped for awhile. I snipped and freed the leg, and the fawn dropped to the ground – exhausted? Scared? In pain? Playing dead? Likely all of the above.
I groaned over my lack of foresight; I should have grabbed some sort of antibiotic spray or cream from Rick's vet truck to apply to the deep wound before releasing it. The doe was waiting in the weeds beyond; I doubted the fawn would wait for another round trip to the garage for medicine. Sure enough; after I moved away, I could make out the fawn moving through the grass and weeds towards its waiting mother. All I could do was pray that it heals and survives, poor baby, and get back to work.
I turned my attention to picking berries and red currants and taking pictures of current and future harvests.
I made a big dent in the boysenberries, a smaller dent in the currants, and a tiny dent in the marionberries before my horse escaped under the single electric strand containing part of the upper pasture. I put my containers in the garage for safe-keeping and moved both horses to the securely-fenced lower pasture. Since I was down there anyway, I checked the sheep's hay feeders and water buckets – and Brigitte slipped by me.
She's as tame as a dog so haltering her and putting her back in the fold was not a problem, but I needed to assess and photograph the four weaned lambs for marketing purposes
anyway, so.... You know how it goes. (You'll have to wait until tomorrow for those photos.) ;-)
That's it for now from . . .
7 comments:
Sounds like you've had some extra work put into your already busy day...maintain the pasture, free the wildlife, pick your berries and catch up with your animals being ornery.
Poor baby thing. Sometimes it pays to be nosy even if means startling mother and baby. Errant sheep wrangling looks a lot like errant goat wrangling.....
Talk about having something that needed to be done every single time you turned around! Some days can really be packed full, can't they?
Great pictures of your adventures.
In this case, the weeds were a blessing, weren't they? They led you to the fawn. I hope it'll be okay...thank you so much for rescuing it.
As always, I love your photos and posts.
Oh no :-(. Glad you were able to free it. Have to poked around to see if it was able to finally stand up?
Poor little squirt. I hope it makes a full recovery - they are pretty resilient. I know what you mean about the weeds! It seems that every time I turn around, I find a thistle I missed! And it doesn't help if your neighbors don't keep a lid on theirs, too.
What a blessing you were to that fawn. I'm glad you saw the mother. I hope it will survive the ordeal and have a long and healthy life. Thank you for saving it! Your garden shots are wonderful - those red currants look like I could reach out and pull them through the screen!
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