Sand and deer tracks

This morning, after a long break, it was back to business as usual, well, my usual business, which is to say, get up, make coffee, eat breakfast, grab my dSLR, then go out for a walk to get my brain ready for writing. This being a Monday, the writing task typically entails creating yet another edition of my weekly natural history column, "A Naturalist's Journal," which has been a fixture in a number of Rhode Island newspapers for the past 35 years. Most of the pictures for the Journal are culled from those I take daily, and the ideas for the columns often arise from what I spot on my walks. This image of a White-tailed Deer track in wet sand is not likely to make this week's Journal, but I'll certainly be writing about tracking animals in the not-too-distant future, so it was an image I simply had to capture and file away. It was a good-sized hoof print, probably belonging to one of our neighborhood bucks. Perhaps he has already attracted the attention of one of the more numerous does around here. Perhaps he will not attract the attention of our local hunters.