Bambi?

Well, we've had Thumper hanging around, why not Bambi and his mother? Just so long as Flower doesn't show up! (If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading Felix Salten's Bambi: A Life in the Woods. Forget the Disney crap.)

They didn't do too much damage to the tomato plants (after Jason woke me at o'dark-thirty to tell me about it, I had a dream they'd eaten all the tomatoes and the entire planter of green beans). Just nibbled a few branches on the grape tomato plant and took all the fruit off. There are still plenty of blooms and I have three finishing up on the kitchen window sill.

As surprised as I wanted to be that deer showed up in my backyard (I live in a very suburban area), I'm not all that surprised. Nearby Bee's Ferry Road which is being developed faster than ice cream melts in August, was almost entirely hunt club land. Driving home from the Publix yesterday, I noticed an entire new area, scraped clear of every tree and bush for acres and acres, barely concealed behind the ten feet of "green space" left between the carnage and the road.

I looked at the Google map of the area and I suppose they could be living in the small wooded area behind the Canterbury Woods subdivision and just walked along the creek edge to my backyard. Or up Parsonage Point Road, there is a large property that the owners so far have resisted the lure of big money promised by developers. Perhaps they live there and took a swim across the creek to get here.

I really don't like the idea of deer eating my garden, but I'm happy they are managing to survive so far.

I won't go on a rant about out of state pus pockets on the bellies of leeches, I mean real estate developers, who come in, buy up land, strip it bare, plant a tree or two, slam up some vanilla slum McMansions, then leave with all our money. Not even when the housing market pretty much sucks and I sure hope that desecrated land doesn't just sit there, destroyed, because no-one wants to buy a house there.

But I'm sure people will buy. They'll be happy to live in a subdivision named for what it destroyed. There is already a Hunt Club Subdivision built on the deforested land of what used to be a real hunt club, rife with life. Now dead and sterile, the only reminder of the abundance of life once found there is the occasional carcass on the side of the road.

So maybe I'll mosey on up to Cross Seed and buy some deer feed and put it out in the marsh.

Thor sez: I would have run them off for you, but as you can see, I have no thumb with which to turn the deadbolt.