Flashes of Panic

When I was hanging a load of laundry on the lines behind my parents house, I thought, “This isn’t how I usually spend my on-line time.”

About an hour before I went out to take the laundry in (it’s been sprinkling all afternoon, so far) we looked out the window to observe the local wildlife. In Amherst I’m used to watching squirrels, occasional bunnies, and the neighborhood cats in our yard; here, it was a deer picking through the back-yard salad bar. I got this photo out the window as the deer considered picking some fruit from the crab-apple tree at the corner of the yard where the brush comes closest to the house; shortly afterward, my movement behind the window spooked it enough that it bounded over to the farthest end of the yard, and finally vanished.

And I’ve been getting reports for months of the local “flight school.” The bald eagles who nested on the other side of the island had their nest blown down in a storm a few years ago, but they’ve returned and the new nest is much more visible to passers-by. “Junior,” the young eaglet, has recently been out on his first flights, and it won’t be long before his parents kick him out and force him to find his own territory to forage for food. This pair (if it’s the same pair) have been nesting on the island for several years, so the area apparently represents good eagle habitat despite the human population.