The deer whisperer

Cynthia and I spent all last week at the Lake Medina Thousand Trails campground, near San Antonio communing with the deer. It wasn’t our intent, but the deer around the place were so plentiful, we couldn’t help ourselves. And I couldn’t resist feeding them.

As a member of Thousand Trails, we get a week in a getaway cabin, along with a bonus week in a standard cabin, among other benefits. Needless to say, we plan to stay at a Thousand Trails campground as often as we can next year when we head west to California . Most of the Thousand Trails campgrounds are on the west coast, so we can get to stay there for up to three weeks at a time.

There are several in Texas -- Lake Texoma, Lake Tawakani, where we are keeping our RV stored for the time being, Lake Conroe and Lake Whitney, to name a few. Back to Medina , though. It was our first time to stay there, and we loved it. Medina was advertised as a place with plenty of wildlife -- the deer were everywhere, even on the miniature golf course. We quipped early on, “Is that an obstacle? That the ball has to go though the deer’s legs?” Cynthia said, “They’re a novelty now. By the end of the week, we probably won’t even notice them anymore.” Guess what? They were still a novelty by week’s end, too. It seems you can never get enough of something so pretty. Seeing deer so close, with those big brown eyes never gets old.

Believe me, the Heavener deer pen in Heavener has nothing on this place. By the end of the week, I was feeding a little doe from my hand (see photo to right), giving her a small watermelon rind on Thursday and on Friday three quarters of an apple -- a quarter three different times. I felt I had made a breakthrough with the deer, that I could talk to them. We saw does (upper photo on right), bucks (bottom photo), fawns (photo on right). It was like being in the thick of nature’s wildlife. Of course there were squirrels, too, but we have plenty of them at home scampering around in the yard and up the trees.