Mother Nature right in your face - I'm delighted to see the adolescent Roe Deer bucks starting to practise their rutting fights, but do they have to do it in our garden?
Also, if they are going to do it, could they please take a bit more time over it, and choose a morning when we have a window open, so we can get better pictures? This fight was a bit unfair, since one of the participants hasn't got his horns yet. No-one was hurt.
Things are getting a bit serious - the other morning we had eleven young deer in the garden. They appear to be very fond of our lupins.
[Photos by courtesy of Mme La Contesse Foy.]
Did the one on the left also get a plus one for being uphill?
ReplyDeletePS we noticed the red deer in Richmond Park bellowing and looking boystrous at the weekend. One in particular seemed keen to bestow his, ahem, gifts on the females (keener than them judging by the speed they were running at).
ReplyDeleteThere's plenty of this kinda action in any Rejects game!
ReplyDeleteWatch out for ticks!
ReplyDeleteI should lay in a supply of redcurrant sauce.
ReplyDeleteThese are quite small fellows in quadruped terms. These adolescents' backs are sort of upper-thigh height on me - I've only seen red deer fairly rarely, but they are a different deal altogether.
ReplyDeleteOnce, years ago, I was in a minibus travelling through woods in Lanarkshire, heading towards the Irish ferry terminal at Stranraer, when a Red Deer stag bounded across the road in front of us - one of those weird moments which it is hard to recall clearly - one bounce and it was gone. The minibus was doing about 80kph, the stag must have weighed about 200Kg - as far as I could tell it appeared to land in the middle of the road, maybe 50m in front of us, and disappeared into the woods to our left. It was about 30 seconds before anyone in the bus could speak. If it had come through the windscreen, we would all have been killed, I should think. Difficult to see any other outcome.
On the other hand, the roe deer regularly wander across the road around here, and there are lots of accidents, but I seldom think about them while driving along - we all drive too fast on the quiet roads around here anyway, so it is dodgy. A friend's wife hit one last year - she was OK, but her car was written off, and she was, obviously, very shocked and upset.
At the base where I work, some young soldiers were discovered to have been running a fight club in their barracks without permission. They felt that hitting and punching one another was sadly missing from their training, and so they improvised. When I told my wife this, she was appalled at how barbaric and primitive young males can be, but it seems that we are just slaves to biology. At lease these young lads had not yet grown antlers.
ReplyDeleteHere in North America the chaps you want to watch on the highways are moose. Having a moose come through your windscreen is pretty much game over.