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| brown sheep of the family |
We went looking for the boar today, with mixed success...
The day was grey and overcast for the most part, despite the optimistic forecast from the BBC...but as the afternoon waned, the sun came out and it warmed up nicely.
We wandered off down the lane, camera in tow, to see what we could see.
Almost immediately, I spied a brown or grey animal sheltering under the hedgerow, in a field full of otherwise bright white sheep.
Fortunately I had the zoom lens with me, as they were a long way away, two fields over, and my deteriorating eyesight could only make out a blurry shape.
The photo clearly shows it was just a sheep (also, nice bokeh).
(after this photo, the camera decided it had no battery left, so I changed to my phone...when I rechecked upon arriving home, the camera battery was 94% full...doh!!)
Further down the lane and across the fields, we came across another set of tracks, coming from more or less the same place as yesterday, but heading off in a different direction.
There seemed to be two sets of tracks at some points, one set much smaller than the large.
Here are more of the larger footprints;
As you can see, compared to Anna's tanned hand, this is fairly large.
This lighter is 8cm long, and is about the same length as the fore hoof. The spur indentations are another couple of cm to the right.
We're estimating that this print belongs to a large male. For reference, a male boar would typically weigh somewhere between 100 and 175kg...I'm less than 90kg, and Anna's around 50kg, so it's two or three times the size of her, and maybe twice the size of me...this thing could be huge!
The track ran out when it reached the road, although we did find a potential day nest in the ditch under the hedgerow...
On the way back I stopped to grab a better snap of one of these beautiful red trees, over next door's gate.
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| ornamental hawthorne |
The whole of the verge is riddled with ants nests and mole tunnels (must try to get a shot of a mole, we have loads in the garden and round about, at the moment), making mowing harder work than usual...and when mowing this morning, I inadvertently chopped the top off a busy ants nest...oops!
I had exposed a lot of eggs, causing quite a stir amongst the ant colony, and was still feeling guilty about it.
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| no eggscuse |
This was the best of a poor bunch of photo's I took with the decent camera just after the offence was committed.
Using the viewfinder would have meant lying with my legs sticking out into the road and my face in uncomfortably close proximity to a seething mass of angry red ants! So I just guessed, and took a few hopeful shots.
Checking back this afternoon, as we returned from our walk, they'd got most of the eggs back underground...phew!
As we got back into our garden, there was a hen pheasant hanging around, and I got a few poor shots on my phone.
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| meep meep |
I can't believe I was this close, with the decent camera around my neck, and the zoom lens on, and I used my phone to take the shots, thinking the good one was out of juice...argh!
Oh well, lesson learned!
More on the developing boar incident as we have it...
:-)
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