Heel in the stream

Something in the stream caught my eye a few days ago. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be....

....a heel. Without its shoe. Kind of strange.

We do see a bit of garbage in the stream. Any floating garbage that makes it through all of the brambles immediately upstream from us seems to usually get caught by the fence at the front of our yard (the fence stops just under the surface of the water). Bottle necks from old glass bottles show up periodically in a section of the stream bed about even with our house. We've heard tales of the parties that were held here decades ago, and how bottles were flung off the deck and into the stream. I think we're seeing the evidence!

The other crazy thing of note in the pictures that I took of the heel is how low the stream was, up to a couple of days ago that is. It was low as it was by mid- to late-summer last year. An indicator of a fairly dry spring so far? I'm not sure. But here is a picture of the same area of the stream today, following an afternoon of periodic heavy rain showers passing through --

Most definitely running higher, and muddier, though I don't think you can see the turbidity (muddiness) from my picture.

A Kenmore Herd?!?

I was surprised enough to look out the window this evening see this deer in the field behind our yard -

Then, in the time that it took me to find the camera, four of them were there! That was a rather surreal sight, actually.

It would be SO interesting to know where these deer wander throughout a day. The 90+ acre wetland behind us provides a lot of room to roam, but to move from there to another greenbelt would require crossing a fairly busy street no matter which way they go. One of the streets being Bothell Way/SR522. Unless they go under Bothell Way by wading in Swamp Creek. That connects to lots of undeveloped land that is for now called Swamp Creek Park.

Four deer wandering around together are going to be hard for people to miss!