Several years ago, we bought an undeveloped parcel of land near Pollock Pines, Ca., a small mountain town on highway 50 about an hour west of Lake Tahoe.  This is where Mike grew up, and he has dreams of building a house here and returning to the mountains he loves.  

Our fifty acres of trees and bushes and weeds has sat wild and undisturbed until recently, when we finally put in enough of a road and a clearing to park our RV in our own patch of woods for a few weeks.

We were privileged to be here in the spring and see so many young creatures being raised.  But we also saw the cruelty and relentlessness of nature.  In our first week, we got to know a particular turkey hen and her four chicks.  As she returned over the days, the number of chicks dwindled to three.  Later in our visit, that mother hooked up with a second hen who was trailed by a very tiny chick, less than half the size of the three we knew.  Only a few days later the same pair of hens returned to our camp to graze, but the tiny chick was nowhere to be seen, probably the victim of a fox or coyote.

A doe visited our camp regularly with her yearling (see photos above).  On our last week in camp, we began to see the yearling alone.  While it's possible the two parted ways, we feared that the more likely truth was that the young one had lost its mother to a car or a poacher.