Willow asks: "What's that buzzing sound?"
Here's Willow being a pest while I was using my old metal detector in front of my house in Newcastle. A few years back I brought the detector to Texas to do a bit of coin hunting around the house. Due to a drought the dirt was hard packed and impossible to dig through... almost like granite. On this trip down, in mid-April, rainy weather had softened the ground so digging was VERY easy. The detector is around 35 years old but still works perfectly. Here I got a good signal... something fairly deep, and had put the unit down to get something better than a screwdriver to dig with. What I found was an old water pipe, no longer in use. On other occasions I found a brass "Bull Durham" tobacco pouch fob, several bronze Chinese coins with a square hole in the center, a copper token about the size of a quarter ("State Bar-Good for 5 cents in Trade"), and a silver colored token about the size of a nickel ("Shades Saloon-Good for 5 cents in trade"). The Chinese coins could have come from Chinese workers building the Wichita Falls & Southern Railway, the old road bed running behind my property. Before beginning my coin hunting I checked and found that the deer appeared to be off somewhere dozing or grazing. Nobody was around to bother me. When I tune the detector I set it to emit a faint, barely audible "threshold" whine... very faint. Headphones aren't used because they quickly become uncomfortable and the dangling cord is a pain to deal with. I had been working about ten minutes, with bits of metal junk causing the detector to beep or make louder hooting sounds. This caught Willow's attention. She must have been resting in the shade around the back side of the house. Something about the low whine of the machine really intrigued her. As I moved around, periodically stooping to dig shallow holes and scatter the dirt to pull out bits of metal, she'd get her nose in the hole and start acting really goofy, prancing and dancing around like a horse sometimes will in a pasture. A small spike fallow buck came over, sniffed a few places where I had been digging and began the same sort of behavior. Eventually this activity caught the attention of other deer that had been napping in the bushes over by the fish pond. A few minutes later I had to suspend my digging activity, it being nearly impossible to work a hole without being crowded by a deer, that after taking a few sniffs would start hopping and prancing around. The fresh dirt I was pulling out of a hole worked on the deer almost like catnip does with a cat. Weird... I have no explanation for this behavior.
IMG-0381
Willow asks: "What's that buzzing sound?"
Here's Willow being a pest while I was using my old metal detector in front of my house in Newcastle. A few years back I brought the detector to Texas to do a bit of coin hunting around the house. Due to a drought the dirt was hard packed and impossible to dig through... almost like granite. On this trip down, in mid-April, rainy weather had softened the ground so digging was VERY easy. The detector is around 35 years old but still works perfectly. Here I got a good signal... something fairly deep, and had put the unit down to get something better than a screwdriver to dig with. What I found was an old water pipe, no longer in use. On other occasions I found a brass "Bull Durham" tobacco pouch fob, several bronze Chinese coins with a square hole in the center, a copper token about the size of a quarter ("State Bar-Good for 5 cents in Trade"), and a silver colored token about the size of a nickel ("Shades Saloon-Good for 5 cents in trade"). The Chinese coins could have come from Chinese workers building the Wichita Falls & Southern Railway, the old road bed running behind my property. Before beginning my coin hunting I checked and found that the deer appeared to be off somewhere dozing or grazing. Nobody was around to bother me. When I tune the detector I set it to emit a faint, barely audible "threshold" whine... very faint. Headphones aren't used because they quickly become uncomfortable and the dangling cord is a pain to deal with. I had been working about ten minutes, with bits of metal junk causing the detector to beep or make louder hooting sounds. This caught Willow's attention. She must have been resting in the shade around the back side of the house. Something about the low whine of the machine really intrigued her. As I moved around, periodically stooping to dig shallow holes and scatter the dirt to pull out bits of metal, she'd get her nose in the hole and start acting really goofy, prancing and dancing around like a horse sometimes will in a pasture. A small spike fallow buck came over, sniffed a few places where I had been digging and began the same sort of behavior. Eventually this activity caught the attention of other deer that had been napping in the bushes over by the fish pond. A few minutes later I had to suspend my digging activity, it being nearly impossible to work a hole without being crowded by a deer, that after taking a few sniffs would start hopping and prancing around. The fresh dirt I was pulling out of a hole worked on the deer almost like catnip does with a cat. Weird... I have no explanation for this behavior.
IMG-0381