Wildlife in West Texas

I don’t think I’ve yet shared with you some photos from a camping trip to Fort Davis, Texas. I had almost forgotten about them, as they are about six years old, but they came to mind for some reason over the weekend and I tracked them down.

We were staying in my parents’ trailer at a campsite in the Davis Mountains State Park. Each afternoon and evening a parade of wildlife would come down from the surrounding hills and migrate through the park, looking for handouts. My dad was an easy mark, with his bucket of corn brought for just such purpose. We sometimes got more than we bargained for, as you can see below.

At one point, we looked out the window to see a herd of 12-15 javelinas (aka “Collared Peccary”) noisily chowing down on the corn scattered in our “back yard.”

Javelinas are so ugly that they’re almost cute.

They’re not exactly the intellectuals of the animal kingdom, however. This one was trying to figure out how to get at a few kernels of corn on the picnic tabletop. He never succeeded.

Other visitors to the campsite included racoon, skunk and deer. This is a great shot of a deer trying to figure out what manner of creature Abbye is. I’m not sure what Abbye is focusing on, or whether she’d even noticed that the deer had wandered up. She was intrigued by the deer, sitting motionless except for a quivering nose, watching them forage. She never tried to chase them…until they ran, at which time she quickly realized the futility of the effort.

There’s a scary footnote to these photos. At one point, I looked up to see Abbye staring face-to-face with a large javelina. They were approximately the same distance from each other as shown in the preceding photo. However, I didn’t grab the camera for that scene; I grabbed her leash and rudely (in her opinion) jerked her back to safety. My experiences with javelina have always been relatively benign, but they can exhibit nasty tempers, especially when their progeny are present. I wasn’t taking any chances.