Wildlife around Sweet Spot Ranch

~ For Sale by Owner: $1,490,000 ~ SWEET SPOT RANCH The Wildlife
More "Wildlife" Living Here The Land Sweet Spot Main Page	Wildlife opportunities are unlimited around Sweet Spot ranch. We see whitetails and mule deer, elk, moose, black bear, cougar, coyote, bobcat, badger, marmot and the occasional rattlesnake. You get to see a lot more than usual in this open country. The cottonwood bottom of White Bird Creek, along with the surrounding open country interspersed with wooded draws, could not be better for hunters, photographers and those who just enjoy the land and its abundant wildlife. Predators are not always the aggressors. For example, we've witnessed some odd turnabouts—like deer chasing bobcats and coyotes, or a coyote being mobbed by magpies. This sow and three cubs spent four days in that tree, 50 yards from our house. The first morning, I went out to look at their sign at the base of the tree. I got within 30 or 40 feet before I saw more than sign as the mom stretched out of her bed. I backed out of there and we watched from farther away after that. They would come down at night to eat wild plums, sleep at the base of the tree, and climb up to catch more Zs during the day. At any daytime hour we could watch them from our living room. It was a lot of fun, and we didn't get much done, but in the end we had to run them off (Just say no to garbage bears). I blazed away with 12-gauge bird shot and Jane banged pots and pans. The last we saw of them, they were hauling.	4 bear, 4 days, 50 yards from our house.

Visitor to the shearing shed.

And he kept coming back.

In June this young bull moose (probably a 2-year old) showed up in one of our barns. He was eating something there—maybe old hay or salt, but we don't really know. It seemed odd since there was lots of greenery along the creek. I ran him out of the shed and the corrals (carefully) and thought that we had seen the last of him, but he came back three more times. Once, we were in a pickup and he walked up to within 30 feet of us trying to get back to the shed. He let me blaze away with my camera. I should have taken the camcorder along too.

If you hang around and keep your eyes open (and camera handy), things like this tend to happen at Sweet Spot Ranch.

This sorry looking bobcat walked through the back yard one morning.
He had just come up from the creek area, through really wet brush.

Last September Jane saw 8 elk from our dining table—down by the creek, 100 yards from the house. There were two bulls in the bunch and they were bugling. Last spring I was coming off a knee replacement and getting antsy to move around, so I drove roundabout to a place a mile or so above our home. I snuck down from there to videotape a herd of about 100 elk, then crept back out without them having seen me. That was good enough, but after surgery like that you think you might never be able to do active things again. That really made it a day to remember.

In August she saw two more elk from the dining room. This time I got to see too—at least one of them. It was the young bull above with an oddly shaped rack: narrow 4-point with very short eye guards. He was just browsing along the creek bottom on a lazy, 95-degree afternoon. I'd seen a cow near the bear tree a few days before.

The little clearing I made between the dining room and the creek has been a treasure for wildlife viewing.

Here was another memorable day—a once-in-a-lifetimer, even for White Bird: At about 9 AM Jane stood peeling an apple at the kitchen sink, when she saw movement at the edge of our front yard. From my office, I heard her excited yell-whisper tell me to get my butt out there because she was looking at a cougar. I got there just in time to see the cat move back into the brush. Thinking that was the last we'd see of it, I went for the camcorder just in case. The cat turned back toward the house and I was on it. Shortly, another one appeared in the background. I filmed for a few seconds and luckily ran out of tape. I say luckily because it made me grab my camera and I got almost 40 still shots of them as well. We had figured we'd see a cougar here eventually, but never never imagined it like this.

These mountain lions wandered around the yard for half an hour. They were obviously young ones, maybe half grown and undoubtedly siblings. They had probably been kicked out by Mom and were wandering around looking for their own territory. We guessed they weighed about 50 pounds and were maybe five feet long. The "kittens" (which they really acted like) played on a rock in the lawn for a while, then wandered toward the porch, where they climbed the steps and one of them sniffed my tennis shoes. Jane said, "I'm surprised it didn't roll in them." We had moved from the kitchen window to the front door, which separated us from this nosey cougar by about three feet. The cats paid no attention whatever to movements they might have seen from our side of the windows.

After examining the front porch, the cougars smelled Jane's flowers (much better than my shoes) and wandered around to the side yard, where one of them poked it's head in the personnel door of the garage and then checked out the guest house. We had swung around the house with them—on the inside, of course—staying buzzed and blazing away with camera through my office window and then the master bedroom window. They moved behind the garage then and I was afraid they'd head for the chicken house, so I went outside (carefully). I could see one of them up in the brush. It soon caught wind of me and moved off quickly to the edge of the cover. At that point I yelled and both of them lit out over the hill.

The rest of the day we carried on about how it couldn't get any better than this and where had the cats come from and where were they going. They appeared healthy but their chances of actually getting to set up shop somewhere were unknown to slim, even without people around. Cougar season had just ended but a neighbor toward where they were headed runs sheep. It would be hard to blame him for shooting the cats so we wished for them meals of venison instead of mutton, which could be hazardous for their health.

Turkeys, too.

Sometimes they all get excited.

Wild turkeys are a big success story in Idaho. Both fall and spring hunting seasons are now offered. Besides on our driveway, like the ones in the picture, we have seen them roosting in the tree the bears were in. A caution: Hang-around turkeys make a big mess. Don't feed them—or any other wild thing, for that matter. It's a really bad idea.

The bird life here is outstanding: Turkeys, three kinds of grouse, chuker, gray partridge, pheasant, quail, eagles (golden & bald), osprey, and many hawks, falcons and owls. And a very long list of colorful songbirds. Watching CNN one morning, something caught my eye out the window. It was a bald eagle flying just over the house from up the canyon. He carried something in his talons and was being mobbed by a dozen or more magpies.You don't need the Discovery Channel when you live at the Sweet Spot.

We have hundreds of quail resident on our property. The hungry buggers make reseeding an interesting task. In spite of them, though, the habitat improvement I'm working on is paying off. We see more pheasants this year than ever before. I videotaped one rooster chasing another as fast as they could run, coming toward the house on the driveway.

Here's a pair to draw to.

Two or three years ago, my daughter and I encountered these fawns down by the shed you see in the turkey picture above. Sadly, they later fell victim to a disease that killed off most of the whitetails in the area. I found 15 carcasses on this place alone. It was pretty smelly for awhile—especially since the scavengers would not touch them for a long time. The malady is called epizootic hemorragic disease and is carried by gnats during particularly dry summers. The last time was back in the 60s. Oddly, mule deer were not affected.

Some sort of population adjustment had been overdue, since the whitetails were way overpopulated. But they rebound quickly. On normally healthy years about 60% of their pregnancies are twins (as opposed to around 40% in mule deer). We see the population expanding already.

This was a great year for every kind of wildlife. Previously, we had two wet springs with a mild winter in between. The resulting lush vegetation kept the critters well fed and there was virtually no winter kill. The bad news for us was that the mouse population exploded (Gus would find them in our vehicles). The good news for all predators was that the mouse population exploded. I kept track of three raptor nests that each brought off all chicks. More typically they'll fledge just one.
Caught him napping on one of my potato plants	All 3 of these great horned owl chicks fledged in a tree by the creek.	A few months later, all grown up

The whole family of great horned owls that nested on our place are still here. The babies are grown now, and we hear them talking to each other down along the creek each evening. Sometimes we see them perched on a branch looking at us (more likely at our chickens and cats, but so far so good). Living at Sweet Spot Ranch is a continual photo op. You just have to keep your eyes open and camera at hand. I guess you could consider the blur at right to be in the wildlife category, too. It's Rocky, our banty rooster. He and I have an ongoing battle, which Jane says I've encouraged (naaaah). He'll sneak up on me when my back is turned and leap up on my leg, like he's training for a cockfight. If I put my foot toward him he puts his training to work.	Looks like Rocky's winning this foot fight.
You'll find more Sweet Spot wildlife scenes here, and back at Eye of Idaho.


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