Animals are having babies all over the ranch. I've been seeing baby rabbits everywhere I look and yesterday I saw an American woodcock walking through the brush with its chicks. For the past few weeks I've also noticed a killdeer nest in my hay storage area. I've given them plenty of room when I'm working and today the babies hatched. I managed to take a photo of them hatching from a distance with a zoom lens. I was so far away when I took the photo that I only realized they had hatched when I looked at the photo close up later on. It's amazing what you can do with cameras these days.
It looks like the ones that hatched were only a few hours old. I read later that killdeer chicks stand up and walk away with there parents within 24 hours of hatching. To me killdeers (or is the the plural killdeer), are an amazing bird. The parents will fearlessly lead predators away from a nest pretending to have a broken wing. They'll run along with the fake broken wing leading the predator farther and farther away and then fly off back to the nest when the predator has been lured far enough away. Pretty cool.