Digging and animals

I spent most of today digging the ground to prepare for my garden. I am at 55% complete. How do I know? My garden is 10 fence posts in length and I have dug 5 1/2 lengths so far. Due to all the weeds and grass I have to remove I seem to only dig 10% each day.

And that's not all my digging. After I catch pocket gophers I have to dig to find new tunnels to place my traps. I also dig around tree stumps. Yes, I found yet another mostly submerged tree stump in the south pasture. At least the other three or four items of wood peaking out of the ground here and there were just that, and not more tree stumps.

A decent sized whitetail deer came walking through the south pasture as I was digging around the tree stump. It was heading back towards the trees along the river. Either I missed it coming out of the trees earlier or it is roaming boldly during the late afternoon. Once it noticed me it ran off at a trot. Upon reaching my fence it easily bounded over it. It was like it had springs for legs as it seemed to go "boing" over the fence.

Two large geese were in the river near the nest I found earlier. They got out of the water and walked towards the nest. As the nest has no babies and some broken (hatched?) shells nearby I looked for baby geese following these two but saw none. Upon noticing me one goose stood up tall with its neck straight and started to honk loudly. After a minute of this racket they walked back to the river and got in. A couple of ducks across the river took flight and then so did the geese. Still no sign of baby geese. I doubt the geese would fly off without them.

Elsewhere near the river I found several large pieces of an animal skeleton. One leg had a birdlike claw. Maybe a duck skeleton? I'm not sure as the entire skeleton could not be found.

Just after sundown, as I rode my bicycle along the road, I saw a large owl fly up out of the field east of my place and the road. The owl flew to the top of the telephone pole next to the road. It was huge! The owl could easily fly off with a cat or small dog.

After a nice day, late afternoon the wind blew. 21 mph gusting to 28 mph. Reminded me of North Dakota and Minnesota. The wind was annoying and made digging of my garden that much slower.