I took it easy this weekend. After cleaning up from the massive party I didn't do much of anything aside from try to revive a dead battery in my Subaru, read Tom Clancy's "The Bear and the Dragon," and play Total Carnage with my arcade controller.

As I was loafing about, I happened to notice that there were two very large male mule deer in my backyard. They were just hanging out and eating some grass where the snow had thawed away under a tree. The weather was extremely warm this weekend (upper 50s), so I put the telephoto lens on my camera and went out on the upstairs deck to take some pictures of them. One of them was behind a piece of fence and the other was behind a rock, but I did the best I could.

I also got some shots of the birds that frequent the feeders in the backyard. Mostly we get Oregon juncos and dark-eyed "grey-headed" juncos (Junco hyemalis), but there was also a mountain chickadee (Parus gambeli) in there.

[picture links soon]

It's odd, at the old house the bird inventory was totally different. We got mostly house finches (Carpodacus mexicanus) and grosbeaks (Pheucticus melanocephalus). Although we're less than a mile from the old place and at approximately the same elevation, we get completely different birds. Perhaps they are rather territorial of their feeders. There are so many juncos that perhaps they scare away other birds...