June 26, 2024

Close Encounter

My wife woke up at four in the morning to study, while I stayed in bed until five. After washing up, I sat down with her and we sipped our morning coffee together. Today, she was leaving early at six. At a quarter till the hour, I went out and moved her car to the front of the house so she wouldn’t have to trek through the wet grass, still soaked with dew. After she left, I sat down at my computer to edit a writing piece.

This morning, I walked into the woods earlier than usual, so I could spend a little extra time sitting in the blind. The dark clouds helped to cool the morning air. While the temperature was more comfortable, however, the light in the forest was dimmer than I preferred for shooting pictures. Each day in the woods brought its challenges.

I made my way down the trail to the blind, zipped myself in, and set up my main camera on a tripod. The air was still, and the forest was so quiet that I felt like the wildlife could hear me breathing. After my chair sank into the ground, I readjusted it, checked the windows and all my camera settings, and waited. 

Despite the area being set up for several days now, the birds still had not come to the area. Just when I thought the morning would be uneventful, a small wren landed on a perch in the feeding area. I snapped a quick picture, hitting the playback button to see the photo. The feeding station setup looked great in the photos, and I was happy I had moved it all around last Sunday.

When I looked up from my camera, the wren had flown away, but to the right, I saw something more amazing. A whitetail deer had shown up and was feeding quietly about twenty yards away. The deer hadn’t detected my presence. I operated my equipment as quietly as possible as I snapped photographs and grabbed videos of the doe. There was another deer about ten yards behind her, but I couldn’t tell if it was a fawn or an adult. It never showed itself.

The deer could probably smell me because she kept stopping and staring at the ground blind, with both caution and curiosity. There, the deer fed for over twenty minutes, taking turns eating the grasses and trying to figure out what was in the blind. At one point, she started stamping her feet, moving in circles, and drooling with spit, warning me she was not to be messed with.

The deer finally walked away slowly. The entire experience was surreal. As I was catching my breath and looking at my photos, I saw the deer move into the trees, where it circled back to my right, still staring at the blind, this time from only fifteen yards away. She was very curious, and I happily continued taking photographs. Finally, when I moved the cloth on the window to clear the space for my lens, the deer saw my fingers and spooked, barking seven or eight times as she ran off. She was not happy.

I arrived home exhilarated from the morning, ready to shower and get to work. While getting dressed, I remembered going out to shoot photos a few months ago, when the deer were sparse. Thinking back to some amazing videos I took the year before, I had wondered if I would ever have those encounters again. Now, just a few months later, I was having the best wildlife experiences of my life. Improving my craft over the past two years had prepared me to capture better pictures and footage.

My work day started with a three-hour meeting. I wondered what could go wrong as the Gilligan’s Island theme song played in my head. It all started with a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour. The day turned out to be busy, but productive.

During my lunch break, I wanted to get out of the house. I thought about picking up lunch somewhere or going to sit in the blind to shoot photographs. Unfortunately, a heat wave had taken over the area and the heat index was at 104 degrees, making it so hot and bright outside that I opted to stay inside and eat lunch at the house. I felt bad for the dogs as they went outside for five minutes at a time. I was sure they felt cooped up. We all did.

When my wife arrived home, we sat down on the couch, talking about the heat while sipping hot coffees in our air-conditioned home. She was in good spirits, and it was nice to reconnect with her. She got busy studying while I dove back into my work.

After work, I edited photos I had taken over the past few days. There were shots of dragonflies, spiders, squirrels, and, of course, the deer. Looking through my photo library, I felt fortunate to have access to nature through photography. Apart from being a skill I was trying to master, photography was teaching me new ways of seeing the world and documenting my life’s journey. There was a breadth and depth to the whole endeavor that I found deeply meaningful.

My wife made an amazing dinner, serving homemade mac and cheese, made with ziti, a refreshing Caesar’s salad, and reheated ribs we smoked the night before. After we ate, we took a walk into the secret trailhead, watching the fireflies as several squirrels scattered from the feeding area. 

While walking through the tall cedars, we heard movements in the woods, but never saw what made the noise. As we exited the tree line, however, we heard a deer bark as a herd darted through the trees and out of sight.

We purposely ate earlier than usual so my wife could go to bed early. She decided she would wake up at four in the morning for the next couple of weeks to prepare for her upcoming end-of-year exam. We both learned it was hard to focus at the end of a workday and knocking out study and writing time before the day started produced better results. Pay yourself first, as the old saying went.