Today, the first fine weather all week gave us the perfect opportunity to get out and about in the Essex countryside. So, we motored out to Loves Green, the scene of a previous geocaching afternoon. We weren’t there to primarily search out treasure, though.
The area is well-known for deer sightings, and it was the possibility of seeing a herd of the graceful animals that had lured us into the shaded and sometimes dimly-lit woods this afternoon. We had to wait even less time than we thought before we saw something.
As we started to walk down the sometimes muddy rutted field track, the tall wild stubble to our left moved and two heads popped up above the wavering stems. Swivelling around like submarine periscopes, they surveyed the view to the left and to the right, before sighting us some distance away down the path. We just had time to reach into our bags and retrieve our cameras before there was movement again.
The cut stubble moved gently once more, and with a ssh-ssh-ssh-ssh, the deer elegantly leapt through the field, their heads and bodies bobbing up and down, like funfair carousel horses. Coming to a clearing in front of us, they revealed themselves to be a pair of parents with a young fawn. Surveying their surroundings once more, they thought better of us and disappeared again into the gently undulating landscape.
Pleased with our first sighting, we carried on down the path, carved out by walkers and bramble pickers before us, and into the often muddy woods. Eventually remembering where the well-hidden and well-stocked cache was, we liberated a travel bug and signed the geocachers’ log. Many pages of the log told tales of lucky deer herd sightings, while others conveyed less fortunate stories.
Walking through the field which yielded a far away and fading light herd sighting when we last visited in January, today there was nothing. Vowing to come back in the summer seemed so far away all those months ago, and we did think back then that we would be luckier than we were today.
Wildlife is precisely that, though; wild and unpredictable. So, the pictures here will have to do until the next time, but, I think we were happy with what we had seen, even if it was through our zoom lenses.
[...] Last time we considered ourselves lucky when we saw a small family group of three, but this time we thought we’d not been quite so fortunate. Three were galloping through the woods just to the left of us, but were so quick, we only just caught sight of them. [...]