Daylight deer and mountain views

Around 9 am Wednesday morning I saw ten or eleven deer in a line come from my pasture, run across my hayfield, jump the fence to the road, and continue eastward.  A mixture of bucks and does.  No fawns.  It was odd to see so many deer at this time of the day.

Later in the day I went to check my pocket gopher traps in the pasture.  No trapped gophers.  Instead that pesky gopher again covered my trap with dirt.  So much for my last ditch effort to catch my 250th gopher for 2009.

While in the pasture I heard human and machine noises from across the river.  Due to the trees I couldn't see the cause for the activity.  It sounded like it was coming from the area where the neighbor formerly had a irrigation pump to pump water from the river.  Perhaps he is again installing an irrigation pump.

Anyway, all that commotion would explain why so many deer were out in the open during daylight.  Usually the deer spend the day in the trees around the river.

Here are photos I took later that afternoon of my view of the Swan Mountain Range.