Had an interesting chat with the Local Character yesterday. He confirmed that there really is a stag in Pipley Wood. It mostly dwells in the long grass between the Wood and Dave's pig fields, apparently. He also informed me that most of the living deer I've been seeing are actually muntjacs. But here are some possible non-muntjacs in a picture I took using my expert Nature Photography skills:
The Local Character is pro fox hunting but agin' most of they silly bugg-rrs who come up here in full camouflage an' everything with shotguns to shoot bloody squirrels. Foxes have to die one way or the other and hunting is better than shooting, for the foxes and for the human soul, he more or less said.
Anyway, back to the dead animals I've been spotting. This, I think, is a dead weasel. The only evidence I have for it being a weasel rather than a stoat is that weasels are weasily spotted and stoats are stoatally different (Update: according to Sophie, it is in fact a stoat. Further update: but she's wrong). Either way, it's definitely dead.
And now a very dead badger. It's too revolting to display without a warning, so I've put it here. Don't click if you're faint of heart or weak of stomach.
WEEP NOT! I mean, weep not, for the badger or the possible weasel, however, or else weep for all things: they had their brief spark between the eternal darknesses and Time is meaningless for them now. We go on.
15 comments:
That is most assuredly a dead stoat and the deer in the top picture are too long-legged to be muntjack. Muntjack are beastly, squat, labrador-sized things. Very un-British, in fact.
Ooh, I don't know about that Sophie, I know lots of beastly, squat Britons.
I bow to your superior knowledge re the identification and will amend as appropriate.
Is there, I wonder, a term covering those persons who spend their lunch hours snapping away at deceased beasts. Our stoats have little leather waistcoats and squeak with a cockney accent they are as fat as butter having feasted on misc moorhen and blackbird chicks, yum yum.
I actually think it is a weasel: stoats always have a black tip to their tale and - as far as I can see - that one doesn't.
I don't know if this helps in the weasel/stoat debate, but it was really teeny. Maybe 6 inches long.
You could be right, Recusant. I'm well known for being confidently wrong on occasions too numerous to mention. But I thought I detected a little darkness to the partially obscured tail. We could always ask Brit to go back and have another look.
Also, and I'm loath to say it for Sophie's sake, but I really do think they're muntjacs. They were small and prowly.
The stoat/weasel is gone, I've checked. I expect something ate it, a cat or a vulture or a hyena or similar.
Reculsants right, it's a weasel, Sophie, off to Optical Express with you.
Oh, the shame of it. And these reading glasses cost a small fortune....
We need Nige to settle this one.
It's definitely not a wombat anyway.
Well let me see... I reckon a dead weasel and a couple of fallow deer? Cld be smaller - roe deer? There are as many deer now as in medieval times - surprising we don't see more of them - they're everywhere.
A weasel it is then. And some fallow/roe deer. Thanks Nige.
Perhaps I should get a proper camera.
One out of two ain't so bad.
Hmmm, a rural mystery, eh? Looks like another benefit of This Great Coalition of Ours is the return of sturdy 1950s children's entertainment.
Let's ask Uncle Quentin whether there are any suspicious foreign types about.
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