i'm baaack

And so are they.

The javelina's. They were still around during the hot day's of summer, but we didn't see them quite as often. Mostly, when we did see them, they were running across the road while we were driving. We have not seen any in our yard, thankfully, since last winter.

The neighbor dogs were barking like crazy one morning. Still in my p.j.'s, I went out to see what the commotion was about. I spotted this group on the upper part of our yard behind the fencing. That area is fairly elevated, making it a little hard to see how many there were. But, as they were milling about, snorting and scuffing at the ground, I was just happy that they were on the other side of the fencing.
I was using my zoom lens but wasn't happy with the pictures I was snapping. Because I didn't have my "reading" glasses on, I put the camera on auto focus. Which was giving me fits because it wanted to focus on the fence, the bushes and the ground... everything except the javelina.
So, I bravely got up close and stuck the lens through the fence bars. The problem with that was that the ground was so far above my head I was still having trouble with the whole focusing thing. And remember, when I'm putting myself in grave danger to get these photographs, I'm constantly looking over my shoulder and around my feet for other wild creatures. In this case, my hands were actually shaking from the adrenalin and worry that somehow one of these guys might try to charge me through this strong fence. I had to hold the camera above my head and just randomly snap away, hoping I was getting something of interest. And, because of that minor detail of the "reading" glasses, I couldn't even review my pic's to see what I was actually getting. It wasn't until I uploaded them that I found I had a lot of this:

And this:

But then, I saw that I had gotten lucky and had a few of these. This momma was keeping an eye on me because if you click on this photo to enlarge, you will see that she has a wee little one under her belly, nursing! Imagine my surprise! When I was further back I thought I could see a little one moving around, but with so many of them (I think there might have been about six big ones) it was really hard to tell what was what. I kept snapping away, camera held above my head, because at this point being up close to the wall and fence, I couldn't actually see them at all. Until one took a few steps closer.

And that is when we were looking eye to eye. Or snout to snout. Well, snout to camera lens. His nose was twitching back and forth and up and down. They are suppose to have really poor eyesight so I assume he was trying to catch my scent.
Ummm...hello.

Do I dare say that maybe these ugly creatures are a tiny bit cute?