In which we have visitors

I was throwing some scraps into our firepit to burn them, and noticed that we'd had a visitor sometime after the rain had stopped last night.

Here's a closer look

Looks like some decent sized claws to me. I'm not quite sure what he was looking for around our firepit, but I think he may have found it:

All in all, I was ready to call this an interesting morning and go for coffee. But then I found these:

Leading up to our shed.

I wasn't sure you could really appreciate how large this guy was, so:

He's BIG. Mom was worried that we hadn't seen any deer in a while, but hey:

Looks like we don't have too much to worry about. I was looking for more tracks, and I found another visitor as well:

This is a puffball mushroom after it's gone to spore and exploded. Looks like I'm going to have to check the field for mushrooms next year! Given that this one was fairly dry inside and we've had rain the past little while, I'd have to say he exploded fairly recently.

It was quite a day, and it ended off with a blizzard:

We were happy to head in after that.