Was coming back from checking my blue grouse wing barrels on Wednesday when I spotted this red and white lump alongside the road.

If the place looks familiar, yes, that is where one of the antelope groups I spotted and photographed last week was trying to figure out the fences.

Carcass wasn't there Tuesday.

Our new right-of-way fence has made its first kill. In less than a week.

Looks like the buck tried to squeeze in over the bottom wire, and under the second. Probably in a hurry. Probably in a panic from traffic.

You notice he had managed to negotiate the fence at least once, since he was inside, going out.

But his back legs went under the bottom wire, and then he was trapped. With the tightly-strung wire pressing up against his gut. He fought enough to rip one staple out of the fencepost, but that didn't help.

Don't know how he finally died. Something, presumably a coyote, ripped off and ate his front left leg. Don't know if the predator found the buck helpless and finished him off (doesn't look like it... no wounds on the neck that I could see), or if the buck had already died of either stress or asphyxiation when the predator came to scavenge.

But that's one so far.

When they finished fencing phase two of this road reconstruction, it was a month or two before we found an antelope killed by the new fences.