Another reason to love Lynchburg

Today began and ended with photographs of things I love here in Lynchburg. I realized that I had not written a "Why I Love Lynchburg" post in a while, so here it is—Another reason why I love Lynchburg.

This morning I took my camera with me when I walked with my son down to his school bus stop. In the Fall, the mountains across the street from the bus stop are covered with early morning fog. The leaves are just beginning to turn to their Fall colors. And the house across the street from the bus stop is one of our favorite houses here in Lynchburg. So I wanted to take a picture if the lighting turned out to be appropriate. It was—and I did.

David waiting at the bus stop

Then in the evening we decided to let David light our first fire of the season in our fireplace. My wife picked up the new Indiana Jones movie this afternoon, so we lit a fire and turned on the movie. David sat next to Kim on the sofa to cuddle with her. At least he cuddled with her until we heard sirens. David ran out the front door to see what was up with the firetrucks going by down at the end of our road (passing David's bus stop), but he didn't get far.

Very quickly, he quietly and excitedly came back into the house to tell us that a family of deer was in our yard eating apples from our apple tree. So Kim went out to see the deer and I grabbed my camera.

When I got outside, I found a large group of deer including seven or eight adults and one very young baby deer. I took 20 photos of the deer as they wandered around our property and then as they headed across the street to go back to the woods. They were not at all afraid of us and stopped to pose for the camera quite a few times. Well, at least it looked like they were posing. Perhaps they were just looking at the strange man that kept snapping pictures. That's kind of what my family does all the time.

As one of the deer walked across the road, she passed in front of a beatiful bush that has recently turned to its vibrant red Fall color. Although many of the other photos were nice, I just love this one with the deer walking in front of this beautiful bush. It's great to live somewhere that has such great sights to see, so close to our house, from morning to evening. We love Lynchburg!

Baby deer

Update Lydia asked me to post some photos of the baby deer. Unfortunately, I didn't get very many good ones of the baby, but here is one of them as the group of deer crossed the road to head back to the woods.

Here's another shot of the baby. Most of the other deer in the group had wandered into the woods at this point, but the baby turned for a final look at the weird camera-weilding man who was snapping photos rapidly.

The deer have grown quite accustomed to us and are not frightened at all by us, but rather simply curious. They still keep their distance to a degree, but they don't tend to run away when they see us, even if we get within about 50 feet of them as they eat apples from our tree. In fact, my wife has commented that it seems like Disney movie sometimes when she walks out into our yard because so much wildlife seems to enjoy gathering in our yard. And when we walk out into the yard, they simply look up at us as if they are waiting for us to break into song.

In this picture, two of the adults stopped on the edge of the hill leading down from the road to the edge of the woods to take a final look. I think they know that we leave apples and pears on the ground around our trees, so they recognize that we're not a threat. Probably the greater threat is the absolutely huge ground hog who has set up shop in a pile of tree limbs near one of our apple trees. When we've seen him standing on his hind legs eating an apple recently, we've often mistaken him for a medium-sized dog. I think he's very well-fed. No pictures of him yet, though.