We get a fair amount of wildlife traffic through our yard. I have posted shots of turkeys, deer and coyotes in the past. It’s time for an update.

Here are some of the deer we have seen lately. First, the does:

That’s a small fig tree between them.

Here is a buck we saw recently.

He was eating the pitifully sparse grass that sprouted after my spring and early summer labors.

This thing flew past my head one night when I took the dogs out.

It’s a cicada. This is an annual cicada. According to the wikipedia article, it has probably been living underground as a nymph for several years. The emergence of this type of cicada is not synchronized like the emergence of the 13-year or 17-year cicadas. It sounded almost like a hummingbird as if flew past my head and landed on the driveway. The dogs were fascinated, especially when it started singing. The cicada song is ubiquitous here, almost a characteristic of the Southern night.

The next passer-by came though a few days ago. Leah called me to the kitchen window to point out what she thought might have been a fawn. I looked out and spent some time trying to identify a fawn in what I saw, and suddenly realized that it wasn’t a fawn at all.

It’s a goat, one of two that escaped from someone down in Texas Valley on August 29. The photo is from the owner’s Facebook post reporting their escape. The goats have been seen several times lately. The latest sighting was Thursday. One of the people I see on Fouche Gap Road on my daily dog walk stopped to tell me about seeing one of them. They are apparently enjoying their freedom, at least for the time. I think they are lucky that coyotes seem not to hunt in packs around here.

Bow hunting season opens on September 8, a date the goats would do well to note.