Interesting First Visit to the Ranch

We arrived in the Texas Hill Country late yesterday afternoon, so we headed out to the ranch last night just to check things out and see how things looked this year.  As expected, there has been a lot of growth since last year due to all the rain this year.  The wildflowers were in bloom everywhere.  Most of the time we've owned the land, it's too dry for the flowers.  This is only the second time we've seen this many and seen the prickly pear cactus in bloom as well.

We saw the usual white tail deer that hang around our property.  As we were walking down our road, this whitetail doe started to come bounding out of the brush when she suddenly saw us and about fell over backward trying to go back the direction from which she had come.  It was so funny.  She clearly wasn't expecting to encounter people.

When we got to our back meadow we noticed something grazing.  Hmmmm, that doesn't look like anything we've ever seen on our property before.  The ranch is about 1600 acres total, made up of about 15 landowners.  There's no internal fencing allowed so all of the animals can roam.  The wild game in residence are White Tail deer, Axis deer, Sika deer, Fallow deer, Blackbuck antelope, and Auodad sheep.  As of last year there were also a few long horn cattle.  But donkeys?  Not so much.  Yes, we found two donkeys grazing in our meadow so someone must of released them on the ranch.  We weren't told about it, so we'll have to ask our neighbor if he knows anything.

Speaking of the neighbor, we decided to go say hello after seeing the donkeys so we headed up their hill.  They weren't at their trailer so we decided to go check and see if they were in the house they are building, which is new since we were out last year.  What the heck????   There's a Llama in their yard!!!  Then we look down their hill and there's two more Llamas down there.  Just for the record, we don't have Llamas at the ranch either.  At this point we are about on the ground laughing.  We've got a Llama to our left and the donkeys have strolled up and they are to our right.  We never did find the neighbors to ask them about these new additions.  Who knows what else is new that we didn't encounter yet.  It's still dark when my husband goes out hunting in the morning.  Can you imagine if he'd enountered these in the dark.  He knows what to expect from the other animals on the ranch, but a Llama charging out of the bush at 6 a.m. could be quite a surprise.