Buck Enjoying a Yucca Fruit
This image has so much going on. The colors that day were popping with everything being a little wet from a rain an hour before. The flat light making what color is present, pop. Click!
This Buck Mule Deer was hanging out with a couple of gals mid-summer 2019 totally enthused about the Yucca fruit. Here mouth open picking on best way he can. Tongue lolling.
I’m thinking he was unaware he was standing on a weathering boulder of Hell Creek/Lance Formation Sandstone cropping out of the hillside. If I could only train the deer to look for dinosaur fossils. I’d feed them in exchange for information where to look. I mean they always have their eyes on the ground anyway…. Maybe “Sneaky Pete” can arrange a deal ? 😜😜👀📸
The density of Yucca here in the highlands seems to be sufficient to get these guys fat and sassy by the end of the summer. They eat the heck out of the fruit and the flowering parts of the Yucca plant. Yucca is a well defended plant and the primary reason I forbid guests from going into the backcountry without full full leggings on as a Yucca will plumb stick you through jeans let alone shorts lol. It also traps wind blown snow into huge deep drifts around patches of it. If you see a Yucca patch driving in the backcountry, your best served steering around it. The drifts totally supply those desert adapted plants an advantage of water in a semi-arid almost desert we live on. (We get 14 inches of precipitation average per year, a desert has 10 inches or less precipitation a year.
Location: Bliss DInosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands. (Wyotana.
Buck Enjoying a Yucca Fruit