I was quite tired this morning, after all the rushing around of the last few days, so I allowed myself a leisurely start, but I wanted to see if there was any rutting activity still going on at Charlecote, so at lunch time I made my way over there.
“You should have come first thing,” said another photographer I stopped to speak to. “I wasn’t here then either, but apparently that’s when they were all at it.”
Oh. Well, never mind, I thought to myself – I’ll walk the park anyway, and just see what’s going on. Which I did, and eventually I found two groups of Fallow Deer: six or eight males of mixed age in the Front Park, peacefully eating together, and the main herd at the far side of the Deer Sanctuary, almost invisible due to the distance and the fact that they were all lying down, chewing the cud. Absolutely no-one was at it, or showed the slightest hint that they might be thinking about getting at it this side of autumn 2026.
Still, the park was looking rather nice in the autumn sunshine, and I enjoyed my walk and my coffee, so I didn’t feel I’d had a wasted visit. I’ve read that Fallow bucks do most of their fighting at dawn and dusk, and if I’d been prepared to hang on till the end of the afternoon I might yet have witnessed some action – but it turned out that this prospect wasn’t quite appealing enough to stop me heading for home, dinner with R, a nice glass of wine, and an episode of Edge of Darkness on the iPlayer.
The deer will still be here next year, and unless I have an attack of common sense before then and take up a different pastime, so will I.
