Wichita Mountains NWR: November 2020

Spending more time at home than usual during a global pandemic leads to some odd decisions.  Like the one Danelle and I made to go camping over Thanksgiving break.  Our search for a reasonably close location led us to the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge, which I'd visited twice before and even camped there with Taryn once several years ago.

The weather was just warm enough -- in the 50s.  We saw one of the refuge's head-scratching herds of Texas Longhorns as we drove in and stopped to watch them for a while.

I was surprised to see a couple of small calves.  Assuming they'd been born in the spring, I thought they would have been bigger by now.

This old male seemed to be calling most of the shots.

I loved the head marking on this calf!  Almost a heart, if you squint a bit.

No matter your species, not much feels as good as a nice scratch.

As we hiked to our campsite I stopped to shoot this Carolina Horsenettle ... and that was it.  No more photos, even though the backcountry area was more scenic than I'd expected.  We were in a bit of a hurry to get our tents set up before dark, then it was dark, and we woke up the next morning to a steady rain.  So I kept my cameras dry and protected as we hiked back to the car.

Despite the rain, the experience overall was pretty good.  I think we surprised ourselves a bit by handling everything fairly comfortably.  Hopefully we'll try again in more comfortable conditions!