New Painting!

I painted the back ground for this a few weeks ago, the rst I did this weekend. A very fun painting to work on, it is in oil 18x18". Hope you had a great weekend
Bill

More antlers!!

Earlier this winter just after a snowstorm I went for a long hike up along a ridge near my house. I was surprised to find large single beds in the snow that were spread out away from each other. I realized what I found was a buck bedding area. Differing from doe bedding areas where many beds will be close to each other bucks tend to spread out away from each other and away from does. In a last ditch effort to find an antler or two that may have fallen off I marked that spot on my GPS so I can investigate it when the snow melts. My theory is that if the bucks are bedding there then they are spending the majority of their day there, thus increasing the chance of the antlers falling off there. This weekend I headed out to this spot and started to walk it in a grid fashion where I basically picked out an area of about 5-10 acres and walked in lines about 40 yards apart carefully inspecting the ground. After about 25 minutes of focused searching I was relieved to find my first antler of the day...within 2 more hours I had 4 more! With my eyes getting tired and the sun getting low I decided to head back home and try again the next day. Sunday I arrived at the same location and continued to scour the area using my GPS to avoid covering the same spot twice. Within 3 hours I found six more antlers as well as a shell from a box turtle which is quite rare as well. Check out the pictures, you can see how close 2 of them were, this would suggest that the deer was laying down when the antlers fell off proving my theory. What a rewarding weekend!