(What I was expecting to post yesterday before the garden foxes intervened!)

I took the rightmost turning on the dusty farm track yesterday, heading up and away from the farm where I have recently been concentrating my searches. It is technically a road, but very few drivers dare it, and those that do usually abandon the attempt Uneven underfoot, lined with narrow hedgerows, and flanked with copses that are peppered here and there with craters from the bombs dropped by German planes in WWII, it is a quiet and scenic trail. Good fox country, but the only one that I saw was back down in my usual meadows, sniffing about on some errand on his own.



The North Downs Way cuts for over one hundred miles along the crest of the hills, often overlapping with the much older trail of Pilgrim's Way. Maybe I ought to walk the whole route sometime The land drops sharply away into the Weald to the south.





The further hill here, on the left is Leith Hill, the highest point in southeastern England. It is not actually in the North Downs, but rather on the parallel Greensand Ridge. Like the North Downs, this ridge was pushed upwards by the same geological forces that created the Alps over on continental Europe.



Also up on the ridge, I found my first truly changed leaves of the season



There wasn't very much wildlife moving, although I did see a somewhat scruffy robin.



One field was being ploughed by a couple of tractors. I crept closer to the hedge, trying to make sense of the jumble of corvids and gulls. Mostly herring gulls, with a lesser black-backed gull (here out of sight) joining the mob.



It's a good place for tracking if the weather has been frosty or damp; our highly elusive local fallow deer sometimes leave their footprints in the mud. And it won't be too much longer before there are lapwings foraging among the stubble. Autumn is coming...

For the last three days, the North Downs have been smothered in dense fog - the type of fog that blurs even the tops of nearby trees and makes you question the existence of the end of your own road This morning also began with little promise, but the sun has indeed broken through, and the local wildlife seems as keen to respond to the sudden brightness as humanity does.

I've actually spent most of the day in London, for reasons that will be apparent in my next post, but when I returned home to the sanity of the countryside this evening I was delighted to find four roe deer on show out in the meadows



Curiously, these bucks show different stages of antler growth. The one facing left in the picture below is still in velvet, while the other has already shed this growth of soft skin and fur. Roe deer rut very early in the year - July and August - but even so, it is somewhat surprising to me.



Also in the group was a small yearling doe.



Two of the herd eventually made their way into the copse and out into the adjoining field, seeming to change colour as they caught the sunshine





And a little sunshine never displeases a fox, either



Just a couple of birds to finish - a robin investigating a nest box...



...and a male blackbird showing his colour against a backdrop of new spring leaves.