The past 3 days, doe and fawns have been very active. All I had to do was go out on the back porch and start taking pictures, but a real high point for the month was that Sunday night we had a .5 inch rain and a great lightning show! This doe and her fawn were browsing along when I took this picture.
Algerita bushes are common to the south Texas plains and the Edwards Plateau and Mills County lies on the northern portion of the plateau. What do algerita bushes have anything to do with outdoors pictures. The answer to this is, the holly like leaves are an outstanding deer browse and like everything else in Texas, they either stick, (the algeritas case), sting or bite a person, but the deer on the ranch are definitely taking advantage of it! Cattle, goats, sheep and humans can eat the young, tender leaves and wine and jelly can be made out of the berries, plus the wood and roots make a yellow dye that the Indians used.
The first picture is of a doe with its head stuck into one of our many algerita bushes. The second picture is of 2 doe and their fawns working on the same bush, look closely because one fawn is hidden in the grass below a doe and the other is just below the doe’s neck.
One of our many algerita bushes is pictured below, the second one shows the fruit of the bush. Prior to December 2011, the end of our crippling drought, the deer had stripped off most of the leaves of all our algeritas!
Early yesterday morning this doe and her fawn were headed in the direction of the same algerita bush, but the flash scared them and they went back into the tall grass, so I kept on with my breakfast and only took this one picture.