Life is good!

Jeanie

I love melanistic animals!

Beautiful!

Very interesting. The mother seems to have a lot of black also so I wounder if she is the child of a black parent.

I don't really know anything about the genetics of this deer family, just that the photographer says the two fawns are twins.

Jeanie

These black white-tailed deer are found more commonly in one region in Central Texas than in any other place. I think I read an article around researchers once who were studying them and they said the specific area that they were studying had more of them than exist in the entire rest of the world combined. About 5 of these black deer are harvested in Texas annually during hunting season. I saw another photo once of twin fawns, but both of them were black.

They are both rare and beautiful, and I bet they're lying low in this heat because those black bodies would absorb that sunlight and heat them up.

Cool. My dad has a race of black squirrels on his place but I've never seen a black fawn.

We have white squirrels in our area and I understand there is a park in Missouri that is filled with them. I have never seen the one that my neighbors (and my son) have seen, but I have seen one at my friends house about a mile from my house. Here we see more grey squirrels than anything else and in southern Oklahoma where I grew up I only saw fox squirrels which are red(ish).

They often have white squirrels on the campus of the University of North Texas in Denton too. All I ever see here are those reddish fox squirrels.

Today one of the firefighters commented to me that we weren't seeing any wildlife whatsoever at any of the fires this last week. I mentioned I'd noticed that too....and we've been out all hours of the day and night.

Oh, if grasshoppers count as wildlife, we saw a lot of them a few days ago out west, but none since. Grasshoppers, however, aren't rare nor are they especially beautiful (except, maybe, to other grasshoppers).

Dawn, I am hesitant to say this because it could change tomorrow, but I have seen one grasshopper in my garden. Of course, if they came early they would have to fight the Japanese Beetles for it. LOL

You need to be especially careful at those fires. Since you were close to a heat stroke once before, I think that makes you more vulnerable. Bless you for what you are doing, but please be careful.

That black fawn is wonderful. I particularly like the photo of him running. It's almost as if he's saying "wheeeee". I've never seen a black fawn before.

The first time I ever saw white squirrels was in So. Illinois where they are quite common. In CA we usually had the big pale blue-gray ones with super-bushy tails.

Soonergrandmom, if you'd like any grasshoppers, you're more than welcome to some of mine. I have more than enough to share.

And Dawn, I echo the above sentiment. Bless you, and be careful.

Pat

Carol,

I'm being as careful as I can be, and it was "only" heat exhaustion that I had at a fire in 2006, not heat stroke. : )

Sometimes it is just so hot and you can't cool down enough especially if there is no shade at the fire scene, but we try to stay as cool as possible. Yesterday we had a firefighter go down and had to call paramedics, and today one of the local law enforcement officers got too hot and got sick. The heat here is just brutal.

About half the fire departments in the county were out on fires overnight last night and into the early morning hours this morning, and we were joking about how much more pleasant it was to be "out there" when the temps were in the 80s in the moonlight than when they are well over 100 in the sunlight hours. Too bad we can't do our gardening in the moonlight, but there's that whole pesky snake issue.

I've seen more snakes in the last 3 days than in the last 3 months. They are coming up to the house where I have soaker hoses around the foundation and lying on the cool, moist soil there.

Dawn