January 2, 2010. San Antonio. Ranch.

Our ranch has gone high tech. It is pretty nifty and certainly informative. David has installed cameras at each deer feeder. In Texas it is legal to automatically feed deer, while in Pennsylvania it is not, so David has installed four deer feeders, that with the use of a timer, twice a day delivers a set amount of dry corn to the ground under the feeder. Steve, who checks for the cattle, fills the deer feeders once a month. Now with this fancy cameras, David can tell what comes to the feeders. The camera is triggered by motion and tracks the time of the photo, so David by scrolling down the pictures can tell what comes to the feeders and what time they arrived. It has been fascinating.

We discovered that our ranch is visited regularly by a lot of wild pigs. This is not good. They rip up the foliage and generally make a nuisance of themselves. They also will attack a human or a calf. This year Steve told us we lost two calves. Now we know it was most probably to the wild pigs. We must start a plan to get rid of the pigs. The pigs only come at dusk or dark. Almost every evening around 8:30 the pigs arrive in force, sometimes forty or fifty at a time. Mostly they are in groups of ten or more, but the pigs must go.

We also discovered that there are very large deer on the ranch. David is a successful hunter, but these biggest deer he never has seen, except on camera. So the camera has been a success, in addition to a lot of fun. Every day we were there, David took the computer with him to the deer feeders and down loaded the recent pictures. Then for the rest of the day we could see what visited our ranch last night. High tech has arrived to the ranch.