A Hexenkopf Rocks story, and it’s late-harvest and deer-rut season | Lehigh Valley Nature Watch

One day last week David and I drove into town around 10 a.m., and even though it was the middle of the morning we encountered deer crossing roads three times. And it was surprising to see a doe running with a buck across a heavily traveled suburban road called Freemansburg Avenue.

Currently we're at the peak of white-tailed deer rutting, or breeding, season, and they're moving around at times you normally wouldn't expect them to. So extra caution is necessary regardless of where or when you're driving.

It was hot and dry that day and it still was the morning I wrote this column. Fry's Run Creek at the bottom of our property is still running, but little by little the width of the water in it is decreasing and is covered with leaves.

Across the street from the other end of our property is a view of the wooded hillside that's turning colors but not very attractively. Every so often, depending on the sun and after the leaves drop, we can get a glimpse of the Hexenkopf Rocks outcropping that becomes temporarily famous every year around Halloween.

The land around it is all grown up with trees, as is the privately owned off-limits land below it. But there was a time many decades ago when David's family owned this land and the area below the rocks was pastured.

One year David's father Marvin took a reporter up to see the rocks who wanted to know why there was barbed wire around them, and Marvin told him it was to keep the witches in.

Recently the Express-Times ran a front-page on the supernatural beliefs about Hexenkopf Rocks , and it made me smile. We live in Stouts Valley directly below this rocky area, and some of the stories we've heard about it, be they true or imagined, are more entertaining than anything that's publicly known.

I won't say what most of them are except for this one. Years before our home was built here on the farm, the guy that built it — he was a family friend — had permission to hunt up there. And even though he seemed to be as normal as you and me, he said that every time he tried to shoot at a deer in that pasture his gun jammed. And it freaked him out so much that he never went back.

We're now at the time of the fall when all kind of agricultural crops are being harvested. Fields may be planted with wheat, corn, barley, oats, soybeans, or rye, but a combine is what is used for their harvesting.

These machines, which can cost $500,000 or more depending on their size, are called combines because they do three things simultaneously. They cut off and gather the crop. Then they thresh it, meaning they remove the seeds or kernels from the plants. And then they separate those seeds or kernels from anything else they may still cling to, be it stalks, straw, or chaff, which in the case of corn is a husk.

Soybeans always produce a lot of dust when they're combined. But now the dry landscape around them has made so much additional dust that it looks like something's on fire.

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