Late Spring in Ithaca: lots of allergies but lots of beauty

Pregnant deer!


A fly, that has evolved to mimic a bee! The wildflower is called Spring Beauty.


A natural forest

A bunny enjoying the fresh grass in the yard.



Trees enjoying the rain

Taughannock Falls

It's not as wide as Niagra, but it is taller! It was pretty cool walking through the gorge to get there!

Deer on campus

Pictures from the deer study

Deer population study

To attract deer to cameras used in this week's population study, which will give us an estimate of how many deer are on campus, we use apples!

We place the apples in front of a thermal-sensitive camera.




The deer quickly learned to wait for us to come and replenish the apple supply.

Snow!

Classic deer damage at my own home!

So why do people want to reduce deer populations? I said REDUCE, not eliminate. We love seeing them in our backyards, I mean look at that face! That's a female fawn that sleeps in the backyard, by the way.




Well this is definitely undesirable. But a VERY common sight here. I haven't seen a single house that doesn't have this damage, called "browse lines"
I mean, imagine a beautiful garden you have or a nicely kept hedgerow.... that turns like this once the snow falls. Even I was disappointed!



My footprints. Their footprints. And a pile of poop.