An unusual family visits

My friends in suburban areas might not be captivated by our visitors today, but in these parts, where they are not uncommonly going to wind up in a freezer, we don't often see them near the house.

Like many of our neighbors, these came down the steps that lead to our personal forest preserve - here's the doe as seen from my seat at the laptop on the island -

 She moved toward the open meadow of our yard and, wary of my movement inside the house, stopped and let me catch her big ears and eyes.

That was when I noticed some movement in the open field below her - three additional, much smaller deer.

 I made sure Moki was aware of this rare sighting.

Back upstairs, my camera just missed catching Momma Deer munching on my overgrown cilantro patch.

 I took a few more photos, trying to show the relative size of the three youngsters after Momma Deer moved down and one hopped over to join her, upper left. Lower right, the other two continued their dining.

 

Here I caught one of them high-tailing it toward Mom.

 

Wikipedia says, "A doe generally has one or two fawns at a time (triplets, while not unknown, are uncommon)."  I found a quote from a Texas study that said twins are common but triplets showed up in less than 2% of the deer examined. Another website stated, "Twins are the norm in most populations, but as many as 15 to 20 percent of does will bear triplets when deer numbers are in balance with high-quality habitat." So perhaps our mountain, in this year of plentiful rainfall, qualifies as a high-quality habitat and not too many deer.

Dupont Search Exercise

For the past several years, Norris has participated in the annual DuPont State Forest Search Exercise.  He works there for three days setting up and operating various kinds of emergency communications systems that are deployed to the field as part of major disasters or searches.  This year, the one major new wrinkle was that Norris got on TV Saturday night when WLOS did a story on the exercise.  The photo below was from the WLOS website.

If you click on the link below, you can watch a video of the news story.  You should be able to see Norris in several different shots.  The TV crew took some video of the public information officer asking Norris some questions, but apparently the TV editing crew didn't find it that interesting and cut that part out.

Click here for video

One other new thing for this year was the communications team was able to use a new radio trailer which had just been delivered to the Asheville Fire Dept earlier in the week.

The exercise provided a chance to exercise all the bells and whistles on the new trailer and find a few bugs that will need to be corrected.  The trailer has its own satellite dish for internet and telephone connections, as well as a number of radios that can be patched together.  The photo above shows the outside of the trailer, which is heated and air conditioned and carries its own generator power supply.  This photo below shows some of the radio gear inside.

The trailer has several available interior light settings, including red lights for night time use.  With the red lighting, you can walk outside into the dark and still be able to see.  It made for an interesting photo below.