Inscapes and Outbacks

White-tailed spike buck
Goose Pond FWA
near Linton, Indiana
29 September 2020

Maybe the hardest thing about shooting inside a woods this time of year is that the tree canopy still blocks a huge amount of light. That's a particularly bad thing for a long lens that needs a lot of light to do its job.

But sometimes luck is on your side.

This young buck silently materialized out of thin air -- as white-tailed deer so often do -- about 30 yards away from me yesterday morning while I was set up mainly in hopes of seeing bobcats. Two very knowledgeable local sources told me that this woods is the best place to find bobcats in all of Goose Pond's 9,000+ acres. Still haven't seen any bobcats, and this isn't the best season for trying to track bobcats, either.

That's why it was especially good to catch a glimpse of this guy out of the corner of my right eye yesterday morning, when I had a strong sense that I was being watched -- and that was just a few minutes after I'd looked precisely where this deer now stood. The early shots in this series were much darker, with the deer mostly in shadows. Eventually he turned completely around and gave me this one last look before, without stomping the ground or snorting, he quietly sauntered away.

Today: a little farther into the same woods at what looks like a better spot for my purposes. Finding bobcats seems to be a long-odds crap shoot in the best of times. Right now, that project seems to be about as reliable as putting a wet finger to the wind and just guesstimating about which direction to go. At a minimum, though, I'll keep getting better acquainted with this woods for visits in better conditions this winter.

Jeff

White River
Kootewi Park
near Cicero, Indiana
14 September 2020

Midday scouting at a nice local place that I’ve thought should hold some good wildlife moments if you’re patient enough to look for them and wait for them

Jeff

Female wood duck and her brood
Henry County, Indiana
14 June 2020

14 of them

This was one of those times when I was mighty glad that my long lens is a zoom. It soon became clear that I'd have to go as wide as possible to have any hope of getting all of these little guys in the same frame. That's exactly what I did here, though I did crop the image a bit in post.

There's an obvious cuteness factor with so many ducklings working to keep up with their protective mom, but remember why wild ducks have evolved to be able to have such large broods. The third of the three broods of woodies I saw in the half-mile stretch of creek that I was on today -- farther upstream and noticeably larger individuals -- had only three ducklings. The next few weeks will be a dangerous time for the fourteen ducklings in this image.

Jeff