{"id":7685,"date":"2010-10-06T16:47:29","date_gmt":"2010-10-06T23:47:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=7685"},"modified":"2021-04-03T22:27:18","modified_gmt":"2021-04-04T05:27:18","slug":"a-rural-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=7685","title":{"rendered":"A rural moment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Camp Meeker, California<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The retreat center I&#8217;m staying at for a couple of days is in the middle of second growth redwood woodlands. This morning, I walked around a bend in a trail , and there were two <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mule_Deer\">mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus)<\/a> standing in the middle of the trail They both froze and looked at me, although they were obviously not particularly afraid to see a human being. I froze and looked back at them. The three of us stood there frozen for four or five minutes until the mule deer decided that I was either not a threat, or stupid, or both. They twitched their big ears, and started browsing again.<\/p>\n<p>They were bending their heads down and eating something that lay on the path. There was no greenery for them to browse on; all I could near them see was old redwood cones; so I couldn&#8217;t figure out what it was they were eating. I watched their jaws move sideways as they chewed. Little bits of stuff fell out of the side of their mouths as they ate. They were not very attractive eaters.<\/p>\n<p>At last I got bored, and started walking again. They looked at me as if surprised that I was moving, and then bounded away in a leisurely fashion. When I got to the place where the deer had been, I saw what it was they had been eating: acorns from the tan bark oaks (Lithocarpus densiflorus or, according to some taxonomists, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bioone.org\/doi\/abs\/10.3120\/0024-9637-55.3.181\">Notholithocarpus densiflorus<\/a>). The bits of stuff I had seen falling out of the sides of their mouths were bits of the outer husk of the acorns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Camp Meeker, California The retreat center I&#8217;m staying at for a couple of days is in the middle of second growth redwood woodlands. This morning, I walked around a bend in a trail , and there were two mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) standing in the middle of the trail They both froze and looked at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,17],"tags":[289],"class_list":["post-7685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autumn-watch","category-sauntering","tag-oaks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7685"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8336,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7685\/revisions\/8336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}