Young buck...

 Look who I saw nibbling in the snow-covered flower bed in the backyard?

This young white-tail buck deer was all business about eating what was below the snow.

Even though not fully grown, he's majestic and beautiful.  Around these parts we must guard against the deer.  If you look in the background, you see a round piece of fence and two steel posts.  It is protecting a young tree from bucks such as this one.  They love to rub and scrape their antlers on trees and they sometimes eat young trees too.  Deer are browsers and will give most anything a nibble.  One year the deer moved in so thick and ate everything down to the nubbins.  They ate all the flowers, pulled up carrots, ate the potted geraniums on the front porch, and even ate my rhubarb--leaves and all-- and here they've always told us rhubarb leaves are poisonous.  Not so for the deer I guess.  They tend to gather in hay corrals in the winter and lay on the hay and leave their scat there to soil it.  And of course, they like to eat the hay that we have reserved especially for our livestock. Sometimes we end up sharing whether we want to or not.

Despite all this, I still think they are beautiful creatures, and I like to watch them all through the year.