In the last cou­ple of months we’ve seen more preda­tors and few­er deer than in the past.

We do have a nice lit­tle buck­ling hang­ing around.

And here he is with one of the does.

We also had a cou­ple of very excit­ing days when we were being vis­it­ed by a bear. We saw him wan­der across the work yard one evening around sup­per time. Here’s a pic­ture of him cruis­ing down the dri­ve­way. And we found him again a cou­ple of nights lat­er chow­ing down on the bird feed­ers. The first time in over 15 years that we’ve had prob­lems with the bird feed­ers. It’s sad that I can’t watch the sum­mer bird from my office win­dows.

We’ve seen a lot of the coy­otes. Fre­quent­ly as a pair. There has been no sign of pups, per­haps they are too young? This is the first year that we’ve seen them togeth­er.

Once more walk­ing up the dri­ve­way in the mid­dle of the night.

The big news how­ev­er is that we have cap­tured on cam­era the col­lared female cougar that haunts our neigh­bor­hood.

Sad­ly it seems that she was in the neigh­bor­hood attack­ing live­stock. None of ours but folks just up the road lost an alpaca.

Some­times you get just plain odd or lucky shots. The dri­ve­way cam­era is some­times trig­gered by birds land­ing on the rail that you can see on the left in these pic­tures. Here’s lucky shot of a bird fly­ing away.

We also cap­ture the occa­sion­al strolling neigh­bor.

Sum­mer is almost over — we’ll prob­a­bly only mow one more time. But in the mid­dle of sum­mer it’s a con­stant bat­tle against the over­whelm­ing veg­e­ta­tion. Here Jim is mow­ing the low­er pas­ture lane

And this one last shot of our­selves com­ing back from a con­cert in the side­car.