Trailing wildlife with the camera is a game of sorts, but it is a game that comes with unique rules about how to treat your fellow "players" Parks Canada have a motto that if you make an animal change its behaviour, you're too close, which is a fine rule-of-thumb, but sometimes the best way to prevent disturbance isn't obvious.
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Autumn is coming. A paintbox of fungi colours is emerging all over the woodland floor, the blackberries are ripe, and the squirrels and birds are increasing their activity. In the meadows, horses wearing warm coats are lit by the first rays of the dawn sun



This morning, further away from the houses, I found a fine-looking roe deer illuminated by that early light.



He evidently knew where he was going - out of the field I was not in his flight path, so I continued down the track towards the farm.



But he soon reappeared. He seemed to be unable to squeeze through the wire fence...



...and trotted down the field towards the track - towards me.



There is another barbed wire fence that runs alongside the track. I've seen deer vault this fence before, but he seemed unwilling to do so, and doubled back on himself. Up and down he went, trotting closer and closer to me. I've very rarely been so near to a wild roebuck. His desire to escape from the field emboldened him, but he still would not actually cross my path.



At this point, it belatedly dawned on me that I was playing chess with this deer I moved, he moved; he was on the defensive, strategically attempting to evade me. I had no intention of confining him to a corner of the "board".



It was rather a tricky one Continuing up the track to the farm was the obvious solution - getting myself completely away from the meadow would allow him to exit it at any site he deemed suitable. But doing so would put me adjacent to the lowest fence for some time.

So I went the other way, directly towards the deer! He immediately retreated to the top of the field, and then, finding his escape route towards the farm vacant, sped away from me and out to freedom!



An honourably drawn game - I got my photos, and he figured out how to defeat the fence!

Or at least, it ought to be, when the prey of choice is a slug (or possibly a snail relieved of its shell - it was a bit hard to tell at that range).



A pair of song thrushes have added our garden to their hunting circuit. They are hopping around quite speedily after their clumbersome prey. I noticed one repeatedly wiping its beak on the ground; whether it was cleaning itself of slime, or its future meal of dirt, I wasn't quite sure
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Only one other picture tonight - the latest addition to one of the local meadows

The magpie is to the fox what the raven is to the wolf: ever-present thief, playmate, annoyance, and herald. They are intelligent. They are adaptable. They must have realised from the first instant that foxes set foot in the North Downs that a land-bound creature worth dogging had entered their world, and now they pester them, daily, with clinging curiosity; foxes pull magpies in their wake like gulls after a tractor

But only rarely do I witness an interaction quite as remarkable as this


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Spring brings more changes to nature, of course, than just flowers and baby animals. Foxes slim down en masse as their winter fur falls out and their sleek summer coat takes its place. It seems to make them rather itchy. Well, that, and perhaps an invertebrate "passenger" or two



I saw three foxes on my walk this afternoon: the one above having a scratch, a second who disappeared very quickly, and this one, a little vixen wandering about with the horses.



She was the picture of spring health



She wasn't obviously hunting, but she seemed to eat something after sniffing at this tussock clump.



A magpie took an interest in her soon after, but she kept heading closer to the lane where I was standing on just the other side of the fence. I hesitated, not wanting to startle her, but she pre-empted my flight by flattening herself down in the grass. She didn't seem overly concerned, however.



The magpie certainly didn't worry itself about me - clearly it had more important things to think about!



Notwithstanding the fact that magpies have wings, which foxes are not blessed with, it seemed to be putting itself at considerable risk Though, thinking back to how the SV and the Scraggly Vixen were attacked quite viciously by magpies in the garden last year, my first assumption was that this magpie was actually on the warpath. But the vixen didn't appear to think so at all.



It kept taking nips at her back. Removing something - possibly loose fur for nestbuilding, although magpies are more famous for putting shiny stolen objects in their nests. I think that this one was actually removing fleas or ticks from the fox.



An unlikely partnership! It is commonplace to see oxpeckers and other small birds tending to antelope and other large animals in this way, but the size difference between a fox and a magpie is much less marked, and being that foxes are predators that are quite capable of killing a large bird, there must be some level of understanding between the two.



But I wonder how long their truce will last!