Our WY house has a screened back porch, and in warm weather we eat on the porch. The screen is a dark brown plastic mesh called “shade screen.” It is easy to look out of, and hard to look into, making it what hunters and birders call “a blind.” We can see the animals and they can’t see us.
It is the time of year when groups of male deer hang out together, their antlers still in velvet. Unusually, we had a group of five in the backyard yesterday. One young buck with a single fork on each side, and four with much more elaborate racks.
One of the group had an asymmetrical set of antlers which the other DrC assures me will make him a target for trophy hunters. I guess the locals hunt some deer but the critters you want to bag here for meat are elk, the truly most elegant (and tastiest) members of the deer family, if not the absolute largest.
The “largest” label belongs to the moose, which are big, but ugly, combining the least attractive features of an ugly horse and a deer. We are here for late spring, summer, and early fall. During that time we rarely see moose and almost never see elk, the elk are up in the mountains and only come down this way when the snow gets too deep up there.
Moose are relatively solitary critters, not often seen in groups. In twenty years we’ve seen one moose in our back yard and maybe five in our region. Elk do herd, especially when they come down to the winter feeding stations (not kidding) set up by the feds and the state.
The best place to see small groups of elk in summer is hanging around the Yellowstone NP village called Mammoth Hot Springs. They lounge on the lawn, strike poses, and (mostly) ignore the swarms of tourists.
Summer in our part of WY belongs to the deer, they love to feed in our yard which is overgrown with aspens and an understory of berry shrubs and prairie tall grass. We’ve left it mostly natural so we don’t mind the deer eating their fill. It doesn’t hurt them, and they don’t hurt it - everybody’s happy.
