Country Sights and Sounds
John Shelley
THERE have long been a few fallow deer on our side of Lough Carra, but these have typically been males displaced from the Partry end of the lake during the autumn rut. The more powerful individuals will often enjoy a few days of dominance but looking after a harem is a 24 hour a day job, and there are always challengers waiting in the wings.
A strong buck will preserve his station for 10 days or two weeks until he is forced to give up his girls and vacate the area. The problem is, where can he go? Exhausted from his exertions, he needs peace and quiet. Yet everywhere he turns he finds younger and still-fit animals that are always ready to move him on. In desperation some end up swimming the narrow channel that keeps Carra as one lake rather than two, and so they arrive with us.
A small number of females have joined them and last summer I frequently encountered one doe with a fawn at foot. Oh, but she was shy. No matter how quietly or carefully I approached the field they liked to graze in, as soon as I raised my head above the bushes her own head was up, her flag-like ears straining, nostrils flared, eyes staring, taking everything in while she stood motionless. Then the ears would flick and she would be gone, with her little one right behind her.
This time I took a different route through the woodland, following one of the trails left by the deer. It led to an aged stone wall that had collapsed under its own weight, through the dense thorny scrub that had sprung up to claw back cultivated acres, and ultimately to the same piece of grassland that the animals preferred to graze in.
The evening brightened and darkened under a succession of thunder showers and intermittent sunshine. The deer stayed away. Footprints in the soft mud showed me they had passed along earlier; perhaps they had somehow been aware of the imminent deterioration in the weather, and had been out to feed earlier than normal. More likely they had heard me moving through the trees and had hastily departed.
No matter how quietly we think we tread there will always be a bramble to clutch at our coat or a dry stick to crack underfoot. The deer are alert. They only need to hear one intrusion into the background noise and they instantly know something is not as it should be. Away they go to the hedge, where they pause, watching, listening, vanishing, as summer shadows smothered by wind-driven clouds.
I looked more closely at the series of slots left in the mud. At least two adult females (the males are elsewhere, growing their new antlers in bachelor groups) and there, scarcely visible, at least one and possibly two sets of footprints made by tiny hooves no bigger around than my thumbnail. The numbers are increasing.
A half grown hare came skittling crazily through knee high grass, playing chase with itself. It ran straight for ten yards, then leaped and spiralled madly before giving one prodigious bound, and settling to eye me uneasily. It crouched low for a moment, then slowly raised its head up high for the camera. Away it went once more as if its tail was afire.
I thought a stoat or a mink must surely be there, but though I waited a few more minutes nothing showed. The last I saw of the hare was an energetic silhouette chasing over the brow of the field.
A stream of pigeons trickled into the tall pines where they like to spend the night, making me think of my own bed. A sparrowhawk glided along the edge of the field, hoping for a late supper, and then came gliding back empty clawed. It twisted suddenly and vanished through a hole in the hedge. The hawks eat a lot of young birds at this time of year. We must all live, somehow.
