Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Leftovers from the strip pits...

Sometimes I go to the strip pits and see very little, sometimes I see a lot. When I was there last week, I also saw the Northern Harrier above. Not a very good shot. This is a cropped portion of the original. He was all the way down at the other end of the pond...and seemed to be fishing. He even sat perched on a dead tree for a while...one that stuck up out of the water.
Then at the other end of the area...actually over in Illinois, I saw these three turkeys...this is a regular farm field. I don't know if it was originally part of the mining area or not. If it was, it has been back in regular use for a long while. It always has soy beans or corn planted here. And when the crops are down, or before they grow very tall, if we go by there in the evening, there is almost always deer or turkeys there.
The two deer above were in the same field, only 2 or 3 weeks prior to the shot of the turkeys. The past few times I have been out there, I have not been seeing near as many deer as I always have before. Go Here and scroll down to see how numerous they were a couple years ago.