Oko Ake Topa

Monday, May 27 to Sunday, Jun 2, 2019: high 83, low 41

Saturday while mowing the “picnic area” near the northwest corner of the Wingsprings sanctuary, the commotion spooked a doe from her rest, but she didn’t leave. Instead, she stood not far away and kept watching. If you look closely, you can see her in the upper-center shadow in the photo above. She probably had one or two fawns bedded down in the tall grass. This caused me a lot of anxiety because twice within a three year period in the 1980s i injured fawns while mowing hayfields along Bear In The Lodge Creek near our old home just a mile to the west. I still remembered crying and crying while riding the tractor with its sharp sickle slicing the tall alfala and grass mix, laying it down to dry and be raked into windrows that would be made into bales that were thrown onto wagons and hauled nearer our home and stacked and then fed to cattle and horses during the winter. One leg of each fawn was cut off by the sickle. We raised both of them: Cikala and Inunpa. This time i was riding a rotary mower and if it were to hit a fawn, there would be no surviving the trauma. The fawns, thankfully, must have been bedded down beyond the perimeter of the mowed area.