Posted in Fieldnotes on October 23, 2008| 1 Comment »
Another badger was killed on the road yesterday, about a mile away from my house in a small wood. There must be another sett around there. A couple of years ago there was another badger killed in almost the same spot, and my wife has had badgers run across the road in front of her there. There must be a fairly active sett nearby.
I told you this was a bad time of year for road casualties…
Posted in Fieldnotes, That's not a badger!, tagged Red deer, rut, stags, Woburn on October 19, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Things have been busy at work and home lately, and with the nights drawing in it has meant that I’ve had less time for wildlife. Nevertheless, there was one spectacle I had no intention of missing, and that was the Red Deer rut.
Red Deer Stag
Last Sunday I took a trip to Woburn Abbey, our nearest deer park. You may think it’s cheating, watching the deer in a park instead of in the wild, but as an experience it was hard to beat.
The good thing about the deer park at Woburn is that it is criss-crossed by public footpaths. If the Duke of Bedford should ever read this, I’d like to say thanks for this generous and far-sighted move. It means that you can get close to the deer and also walk through the park in the afternoon when it is quiet. Whilst the deer are by no means tame, they are habituated to people to a degree, so they are not as shy as their wild cousins.
This was the first time I’d spent any length of time in the park during the rut (I’ve been trail running through it during the rut before, but that’s a different story) and the experience was absolutely fantastic. I deliberately went in the late afternoon, so I had the park pretty much to myself. Even as I walked up to the gates I could hear the Red Deer stags bellowing. The stags had spaced themselves out around the park and were calling to attract mates and challenge other stags.
Red Deer stags are truly impressive beasts. With a full set of antlers, and charged up on testosterone, they seem even bigger than they really are. The still evening air was full of bellows and grunts, giving an unreal and almost prehistoric feel to the situation. They may have been park deer, but this evening they were as wild as any others.
Fallow stag at Woburn
I stuck firmly to the paths and gave the stags as wide a berth as possible. My second-worst fear was that they would somehow mistake me for another male deer and take offence. I was carrying a walking stick, but I doubt it would help in a fight, and I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong end of those antlers. I’ve seen the stags when they clash antlers, and it’s incredibly fast and ferocious.
My very worst fear was that they would somehow mistake me for a female deer…
In all, I spent a couple of hours in the park. Like I said, it was an incredible experience, and I’d whole-heartedly recommend a trip to Woburn for anyone. Make the effort and get out of your car and you’ll be amply rewarded. I’ll certainly be a regular visitor over the winter months.
Chinese Water Deer
In passing, Woburn is the home to many other species of deer, including the odd-looking Pere David’s Deer, now extinct in their native China. Another deer from that part of the world is the Chinese Water Deer. I mentioned these a couple of posts ago. Like the Muntjac they were originally brought to Britain by the Duke of Bedford and subsequently escaped and bred in the wild. To make up for not getting a photo of a wild one, here’s one from the park. Note the large canine teeth. Even so, these little deer are much cuter (and far less intimidating) than rutting Red Deer.
Posted in Fieldnotes, Tracking, tagged badger watching, badgers, deer, sett, Tracking on September 7, 2008| 1 Comment »
It is definitely autumn. It hasn’t felt like we’ve had much of a summer this year, but the seasons are definitely turning. The blackberries are in full flow, the leaves are starting to turn on the horse chestnut trees (always the first to get leaves and the first to lose them) and the evenings are drawing in.
Sadly, the badger watching season is coming to an end for me. Badgers don’t hibernate, so they’ll be out and about all winter, but it is now pretty well dark when they emerge from the sett. Fine for the badgers, not so fine for badger watching. I may try and see if I can watch them using an artificial light – red light is not supposed to bother them very much – but I’m always wary of disturbing them.
Today I’ve been for a wander around the woods and fields. All the summer crops have now been harvested, so everything is looking a bit bare. No doubt the badgers are hard at work getting in their harvest, eating as much as they can and putting on as much weight as possible for the leaner months ahead.
Badger dung with elderberries
The badger dung in one of the latrine sites was dark red and a mass of pips, a sign that at least one badger has been gorging itself on elderberries. Apparently elderberries are edible for humans, but I’ve tried them and they aren’t very nice. I’m happy to leave them to the badgers.
I visited the far end of the wood today in search of the neighboring badger setts that I am sure are there, based on my mapping of latrine sites and territories. Sure enough, about 700m from the main sett I came across what looks very like a badger hole. This fits in very nicely with my estimate of 350m for the radius of a badger territory.
Unfortunately the rain had washed out any tracks from the vicinity, but the hole looked badger-ish to me. There were old dung pits nearby, and some fairly well-used paths. Of course, the only proof would be to go there one evening and see if a badger comes out of it.
The interesting thing is that this is a single hole, compared to the dozen or so holes at the main sett. There has been a fair amount written about subsidiary setts – setts connected by kinship to a main sett, so I wonder if this is an example. To be honest, I’ve always found the literature on main, outlying and subsidiary setts a trifle confusing, but I’ve got a reason to go back and re-read it now. I’ll also try and get down here one evening and see what happens.
The new badger sett - note the spoil heap and paths
As I was sitting contemplating this new sett, a Chinese Water Deer wandered up. These are small deer, about the size of a muntjac, but more graceful. Their most distinctive feature is that they have two long ‘fangs’ or tusks on the upper jaw, which gives them a strange, vampire deer appearance. My camouflage jacket was obviously working today because this one wandered to within about 15 feet of me. Chinese Water Deer are less common than the other species around here. Like so many unusual species they were introduced by the Duke of Bedford in Woburn and subsequently escaped. Now it’s estimated that the UK has something like 10% of the total world population, so they have obviously become scarce in their native country.
Elsewhere, I’m still practising my tracking. The field behind my house is great, as the sandy soil is always full of the tracks of rabbit, muntjac and roe deer. This evening I came across what looked very much like badger tracks. This in itself is not unusual, but they must have been made this afternoon, as the heavy rain this morning washed out all last night’s tracks.
Looks like the forepaw of a badger to me!
Does this mean that my local badger has taken to wandering around in the daytime, or have I misidentified the tracks? There’s still more work for me to do on my tracking. If nothing else, it’ll keep me occupied over the winter.
Posted in Fieldnotes, Tracking, tagged stoat, Tracking, tracks on August 25, 2008| Leave a Comment »
As an antidote to my increasingly desparate attempts to watch badgers, I’ve spent the afternoon having a gentle stroll around the area, tracking wildlife and picking blackberries.
Roe Deer track
I’m really getting into tracking at the moment. As well as being a fascinating activity in it’s own right, it offers a window into the movements of all sorts of wildlife. I’m still very much a beginner at tracking, but I’m finding it very rewarding. Tracking, I suppose, is a bit like reading. I’m at the stage where I can recognise individual tracks, or words, and I’m just starting to put them together into full sentences. A lot of the skill in tracking comes from looking, really looking, at the little details, and when you start to notice these, the picture starts to come into focus. A walk in the country becomes almost like reading a book of what the animals have been up to.
Let me give you an example. I’ve been able to recognise badger tracks for years, but it’s only in the last couple of weeks that I realised that a badger regularly uses the path down the field behind my house. It walks down the path at the start of the night, and walks back up the path some time later on. It’s an adult badger, and it doesn’t run, it walks at a normal badger pace. I’ve never seen this badger, but I’ve tracked it enough times to know its routine.
Assorted tracks in the mud
The soil in the fields behind my house varies from clay at the bottom of the hill to pure sand at the top, so it’s an excellent place to learn about tracking. The clay soil dries hard, so the animals leave very little trace, but where it is damp it gives very clear prints. Today was dry, but there were pools of mud in the ruts left by a tractor. I spent a happy twenty minutes sitting looking at these.
It may seem like just a patch of mud, but if you spend time really looking, there is a story there waiting to be told – a time capsule of the comings and goings of the wildlife over the last 24 hours. In this one little patch there were the tracks of two Roe deer, several muntjac, a fox, and what I think is a stoat.
Readers of the blog may be aware of my long-standing desire to watch stoats in this area, and my utter lack of success in doing so. One of the reasons that I am so interested in tracking is because it may help me to get closer to these elusive animals, help me to understand the habits better and ultimately to allow me to watch them going about their business.
Like I say, I’m still a beginner. There are lots of unawswered questions still. Where did the stoat go after hopping through the mud? Where does the badger come from before walking down the field? The more I learn, the more I’ll be able to answer these. In the meantime though, tracking makes a walk in the country much more enjoyable, and as the evenings start to close in and it gets too dark for badger watching, I’ll have a new excuse to wander about the field and hedgerows at the weekends.
Possible stoat track
For anyone interested in tracking (and I’d recommend it as a pastime to everyone who is interested in wildlife) have a look at Pablo’s tracking pages here. This is what got me started on the whole thing.
I spent a happy couple of hours strolling about, looking at tracks, watching the buzzards soaring overhead and picking blackberries. The blackberries seem very prolific this year, and in a couple of hours yesterday and today I’ve picked about three kilos – enough for another serious jam-making session.
A thoroughly enjoyable afternoon stroll. I just goes to show what there is to be discovered outdoors if you’re willing to go and look for it.
Posted in Fieldnotes, tagged badger watching, tree on August 24, 2008| Leave a Comment »
I’ve spent the evening hugging a tree. And no, it wasn’t a joyful spiritual experience.
The central sett area - note the badger paths and undergrowth
As I mentioned in the last post, the badgers have taken up residence in the overgrown craters at the centre of the site, which means that they are practically invisible from anywhere on the outside.
In order to get a good view of them, I spent the evening up a tree on the edge of this overgrown central area. This tree is next to one of the main badger paths, and gives just enough elevation so that you can look over into the craters.
The downside is that this tree only has one side branch from the trunk, about six feet off the ground and facing away from the sett. This side branch grows up at a narrow angle to the trunk. It is dead, so I only trust it to support my weight at the point where it joins the trunk. Sitting down on it is out of the question, so the only possible position is stand on one leg on the branch. After some experimentation, I found that the most secure and comfortable stance was to reach my arms around the trunk and literally hug the tree.
The advantage of this tree was that I was much closer to the sett than usual. I felt like a soldier in enemy territory. For a long time I’ve looked at this patch of ground from a distance, and now I was right here in the middle of it.
The disadvantage was that it was excruciatingly uncomfortable. Having all my weight on one foot wedged into a narrow branch became surprisingly painful after only about ten minutes. I found that by hugging the tree tightly and going through some sort of slow motion hopping manoeuvre I could change legs and ease the pressure a little, but since I was very close to the sett I couldn’t afford to move too much.
The tree did help me to stay out of sight. Even the local rabbit hopped underneath without suspicion.
One of the local rabbits
At 7.50pm I heard the unmistakable whickering of badgers from the deep undergrowth. This was repeated again shortly afterwards.
It meant two things. Firstly, that the badgers were above ground, and engaged in some relaxed and happy play fighting. Secondly, that they were on the other side of the foliage to me.
By 8.15 the light was failing. No badgers had appeared on my side of the sett. I decided to call it a night, and stiffly and gracelessly I slid down the tree on my cramped legs. The badgers carried on yipping and whickering. With their mocking laughter ringing in my ears I slunk off home.
Curse these stripey devils yet again…!
Posted in Fieldnotes, tagged badger watching, badgers, binoculars, sett on August 23, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Once again I’ve been neglecting my badgers. Or leaving them in peace, depending on your perspective.
Badger print
I actually had a little trip up to the wood last weekend, but although I could hear the badgers, I couldn’t see them. Let me explain. The sett itself is on a small rise in the ground There is a small valley to the north of the sett, with parallel gullies running into it on the east and west of the sett. This means that if you are in the low ground on one side you can only see that side of the sett, as the rise in the ground makes it impossible to see the other side.
The badgers have moved to a part of the sett in the centre of this rise, which, to make matters more difficult, resembles an overgrown first world war battlefield. There are big craters dotted around, no doubt the result of spoil heaps and cave-ins at the sett many generations of badgers ago. This local geography is making the badgers very difficult to watch, so it was not a great surprise that I could hear the whickering noises of badgers at play, but to my frustration they were invisible on the other side of the sett.
This evening everything seemed right for badger watching. It was a Friday evening, my wife was working late, and for once it wasn’t raining. There was a nice breeze blowing in from the west, which meant that I could sit in one of the easily climbed trees on the edge of the sett.
And sure enough, I did see the badgers. The first pair, an adult and a cub, came out of the tangle of undergrowth in the middle of the site at about 8.10pm and sat around the central sett entrance. At about 8.30pm I could see movement in the undergrowth, and through binoculars I could see four or five badgers rolling about, grooming and fighting. With the two that had come out earlier, this made a total of six or seven out at the same time.
I couldn’t make out much detail through the foliage, but the badgers seemed happy and healthy enough. The light had gone too much for any photographs. The long exposure required in dim light means that the badgers are inevitably blurred – they rarely sit still long enough.
By 8.45pm they had moved out into the open, but it was getting too dark to really see what was happening. I use 7×50 binoculars, and they are very good at collecting the available light so that things seem brighter than they with the naked eye, but even so I was struggling to see.
This evening won’t go down as one of the best badger watching sessions ever, but it was nice to get out to the cool freshness of the wood, and good to see that the badgers were still going strong.
Posted in Fieldnotes, tagged bader watching, badgers, frog, sett on August 9, 2008| 2 Comments »
What madness is this?
The frog by the path, happy in the rain
It’s been raining all day. It’s raining now. I’m sitting on a rotten log underneath a tall oak tree, and everything is wet.
There’s only one dry space in the entire wood, and that’s the three inches under the brim of my hat. I’m sharing this dry space with what seems like every mosquito and bug for miles around, but for once, thrown together by a common need for shelter, they don’t seem to be biting me.
It is 7.30 in the evening and I’m watching at the eastern sett entrance. There’s no sign of the badgers, but then I hardly expected there to be. All my experience tells me that they’ll be snug underground. There’ll be no playing tonight – just a quick exit and then off to feed. Badgers dislike the rain as much as I do. Some foolish instinct has drawn me up here, but I don’t hold out high hopes.
A rabbit hops by about 30 feet away. It shakes itself like a dog and disappears for a moment in a fine spray of water droplets. Even the rabbit is soaking.
The rabbit and I play a quick game of Who Can Stay Still The Longest. To be honest, this is not a very exciting game, and it probably won’t make it onto television any time soon, but it passes the time.
The rules are simple. The rabbit looks at me. I look at the rabbit. The first one to move loses. If I move first, the rabbit confirms its suspicion that I’m a threat, and it hops away. If the rabbit moves first, it means that my camouflage is working and I get the chance to watch the rabbit’s natural behaviour. I’ve played this game many times, and the rabbits always take it very seriously. Winning or losing can literally be a matter of life and death for them in this game.
This time I win, and the rabbit hops a few yards closer to me and sits under a tree. It’s easier for me today because any movement of my head sends a trickle of water into my lap, so I’ve got a real interest in staying still. The trick of the game is to avoid looking directly at the rabbit. Rabbits, like most prey animals, seem to have a paranoid sixth sense that tells them when they’re being watched. If you focus your eyes on the ground and watch them out of the corner of your eye they seem to be more relaxed.
At 7.50 the little badger cub appears. It trots quickly by me and into the foliage on the east. The little cub always seems to be doing its own thing, and this evening is no exception. I don’t think it’s hurrying because of me; it just doesn’t want to hang around in the rain.
By 8.30 it is getting dark, and no more badgers have appeared. I’m cold and I’m wet. My waterproof jacket has done a great job, but the water is coming in down my neck and up my sleeves, and for once I decide that sitting at home with a nice hot cup of tea is the perfect way to spend the evening. I know that my last few badger watching sessions have not been a success, but on the other hand I don’t want to be remembered as the man who came down with hypothermia on an August evening in the south of England. I’ll return soon and get back to some proper badger watching.
As I leave I come across a frog on the path. He’s the only creature who seems genuinely happy with the weather at the moment. Nice weather for frogs indeed!
Posted in Fieldnotes, That's not a badger!, tagged badger, feeding, hedgehog on August 3, 2008| 8 Comments »
Having failed to see any badgers in the evening, I decided to take another approach. I was confident that the badgers feed in a large pasture field next to the wood, and it’s always been at the back of my mind to take a trip up there one night and see if I can spot them feeding. It being a damp and mild night with ideal conditions for the worms the badgers feed on, I decided to give it a go.
1.45am (way past my bedtime!) saw me walking slowly through the pasture with a dim torch. And there, snuffling around in the grass, was one of the adult badgers!
It didn’t seem too bothered by the torchlight, but carried on snuffling contentedly. I watched it for about five minutes and then left it to get on with its dinner. I was happy to have seen a badger in its own element, and proved that this method of watching them was possible. I may well stay up late on the next full moon and try this again.
Finally, an answer to those readers who think there should be more hedgehogs on this site (you know who you are!). Folk wisdom says that where there are badgers there are not usually many hedgehogs, presumably because one eats the other. I don’t know if that’s true, but I haven’t seen many hedgehogs around here.
Hedgehog!
So, especially for you, here’s a picture of an urchin that was feeding contentedly on the village green when I walked past. By the time I’d gone home and got the camera he was sitting in the middle of the road, which says a lot about hedgehogs.
I did try and pick him up and move him off the road, but I found out that the spines on a hedgehog are not just there for show – they really are sharp and spiky! This may sound obvious, but I’d never tried to pick up a hedgehog before. I did manage to move him to the side of the road, and left him there out of harm’s way, spiny and verminous, but safe.
Posted in Fieldnotes, tagged badgers, dung, latrine sites, sett, territory, Tracking on August 2, 2008| 1 Comment »
I seem to have developed an unhealthy interest in badger dung.
Let me explain. When I first started watching badgers, I made a conscious decision to stick with one sett and focus on that. There are at least two, possibly three, other setts that I know of (or strongly suspect) in the local area, although I don’t know their exact locations. I know they are there because I’ve seen badgers on the roads or other signs, and they’re too far off to be ‘my’ badgers.
I decided to stick with the one sett because I wanted to really get to know one clan of badgers. Only by fully understanding how this sett works as a social group could I learn about the details of badger behaviour. Jumping from one sett to another and watching different groups of badgers would be fun, but I’ve always felt that it would dilute my understanding.
I’ve reached the point now though where I want to understand how ‘my’ sett fits into the bigger picture of setts in the area – how they interact, movement between setts and so on. Hence I’ve just spent an afternoon looking for badger dung.
Badgers are territorial. Each family or clan controls its own territory, marking it out as its own property. This marking is most visibly done with dung. Badgers are quite fastidious, and they tend to deposit their dung in specific ‘latrine sites’, typically located on the boundaries of their territory. If you can locate these sites, you can map the boundary points and hence the area controlled by a particular sett.
Badger latrine site
I spent about three hours wandering up and down the footpaths around the wood, and I’ve mapped out six latrine sites to the east, south west, west and north east of the sett. The distance from these the sett is 300 to 400 metres, with one outlier in the wheat field 600 metres away. This suggests that my badgers are controlling the territory for a radius of 300-400m from their sett.
Of course, this is probably a gross oversimplification. It is most unlikely that the badgers have a perfectly circular territory. Territory size is governed by availability of resources, so it is interesting to note that the latrine sites enclosed an area of woodland (which provides cover and security), plus significant areas of pasture and cereal fields (which provide food). It seems that my badgers are pretty well organised here.
If the latrine sites do represent a boundary between badger territories, this suggests that the neighbouring setts will be something in the order of 600m away, in other words an equal distance from the boundary, assuming the availability of resources is similar. This distance is somewhat higher that the 350m quoted by Neal and Cheeseman, but they were studying badgers in the Cotswolds where resources are likely to be more abundant, and so territories smaller.
So there you have it. An afternoon of looking for dung has allowed my to predict (albeit very roughly) the size of the badgers’ territory and the possible location of neighbouring setts. I’ll carry on working on this idea and see if I can add more detail in the future.
Something else I intend to do more of in the future is tracking. I’ve become intrigued by the idea of tracking mammals, partly as an activity in its own right, but partly also as a way of finding out more about their movements and locations. This could be particularly useful for the rare and shy species, as I can find out what they have been doing without having to be there at the time.
I’ve bought a book on tracking and I’m reading through it at the moment, but I’ve already discovered that it is more difficult than it looks. It rained heavily this morning so any tracks outside the wood have been washed out, and inside the wood the patches of ‘printable’ ground are few and far between. The best I could do was to find a few confused deer tracks (the tracks were confused, not the deer!) and the odd partial badger print.
These badger prints were the closest I got to the stripeys all evening. I watched the eastern side of the sett from 7.00pm to 8.40pm without seeing so much as a black and white nose. They may have come out of another entrance without me being able to see them, as the view is limited on this side of the sett. Perhaps they’re playing more tricks on me. Either way, no pictures of badgers for this post!
It’s been a good day though. Like I said, there’s enough to learn about badgers to keep you busy for years!
Posted in Fieldnotes, Video, tagged badger, badger watching, badgers, bushcraft, muntjac, sett cubs on July 27, 2008| 4 Comments »
At last, the summer is back, and it’s been a long, hot day. Having done my chores in the garden, it was time for a trip to the woods for a spot of badger watching.
“You’ve got to watch badgers”, I explained to my wife, “badgers need watching! If you don’t watch them, they’ll get up to all kinds of mischief!” How true this turned out to be!
It being a nice day, and inspired by reading Pablo’s Woodlife Blog, I decided to have a bushcraft adventure and spend the night in the wood. I stuffed my hammock and a light sleeping bag into my small rucksack and I was off.
It was a warm, airless evening in the wood. I climbed my favourite tree, sat on my cushion, and waited. And waited. And waited a little bit longer. By about 8.15 the sun was sinking and there were no badgers in sight. By this time they should be up and out and sitting around the sett entrance. Where have all the badgers gone?
Eventually, a badger ambled into view. Not from the sett entrance, but from the east side of the sett. It was the little tiny cub, and as usual it was busy foraging. I couldn’t see what it was eating, but every now and then it would pounce on something, much like a fox pouncing on mice. It didn’t seem to eating anything large, so it could have been catching beetles or insects.
The tiny cub (which is less tiny now) seems to be out on its own quite often, but where was the rest of the clan? On an impulse, I turned round and looked behind me. There, about 50 yards away, was the whole pack of badgers.
Curse these stripey fiends! They had obviously come from one of the eastern sett entrances, and there they
Badgers a long way off, by the eastern sett entrance
were, rolling around in silent badger laughter, no doubt delighted at having tricked me into watching an empty piece of woodland for the last half an hour!
Obviously, they have moved back into the other part of the sett. When I first started watching this sett, three years ago, this was the main area of occupation, but since then the badgers had moved to western end. Now they seemed to have gone back. Is this normal? Did they move to the western end because of the cubs? Had I disturbed them? I shall have to check up on this.
Anyway, the badgers were making the most of the fine evening. There was plenty of running around, play fighting and general high spirits. The annoying thing for me was that I was too far away to get a very good view except through binoculars, and several large patches of nettles hid the badgers from sight a lot of the time.
Badgers playing
They all seemed happy and healthy enough, which was good. The little cub still seems to be a bit of a loner, staying away from the main pack. It’ll be interesting to see if it comes back into the main group later in the year.
Of course, because the badgers were in a different place, they were potentially downwind of me. There wasn’t much breeze, but probably enough. Having satisfied myself that all was well, I left them to it and ambled off myself.
Here’s a video montage of the badgers this evening:
Having decided to spend a night out of doors, I circled around so that I was upwind of the badger sett, found a couple of suitable trees, and put up my hammock. This is a very comfortable way to camp, especially in a wood where the ground is littered with fallen trees and debris. I chose a spot overlooking a deer trail in the hope of spotting some deer in the morning.
I’d love to say that I spent a restful and refreshing night in the wild, but it would be a lie. No sooner had I turned off my light and put down my copy of Jim Corbett’s The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag (a book describing nights spent stalking man-eaters in the jungles of India, and possibly the best thing to read in a wood after dark), than the muntjac started.
Generally, I like muntjac. I’ve a soft spot for these little deer. With two exceptions – firstly, they have a habit of sneaking into my garden and nibbling my sweetcorn plants, which I take very personally. Secondly, the barking.
If you have never heard a muntjac bark before, then it is hard to describe what it is like. The sound is a cross between a bark and an unearthly scream, and in a quiet wood it is unbeliveably loud. It is hard to imagine that such a small deer could create such a loud noise. I was walking out of the wood one day when a muntjac started barking, and I could still hear it when I reached my house, three-quarters of a mile away as the crow flies. The terrible thing about muntjac barking is that they bark about every five seconds, regular as clockwork, and they can keep it up for hours.
A munjac track - I've been trying my hand at tracking
I honestly don’t know why muntjac bark. It may be as an alarm call, or a way of attracting other muntjacs, or a way of warning them off. I suspect it may be for all of these reasons.
So there I was. I had one muntjac barking away about a hundred yards to my left, and another barking back at it about a hundred yards to my right. To add to the cacophony there was a tawny owl crying somewhere overhead.
I may sound a bit churlish. You would think that as a naturalist I would enjoy this. This is what being close to nature is all about. Perhaps you’re right, I should appreciate it more. Nevertheless, it wasn’t the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had. I’ll have to work at this bushcraft thing.
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Tales from the Wood - The Diary of a Badger Watching Man 