Outside my window a young Roe deer buck with velvet horns has just stood for 30 mins eating stuff from the bonfire pile in the field. Last weekend I cleared a lot of the hedges of brambles and trimmed some of the overgrowth. He is munching away and casually pissing where he stands, almost continually, out of a sizeable underslung sporran. I’m assuming all this - at 3 in the afternoon out in the wide open- is some sort of virile performance to the females lurking in the shadows of the woods he’s come out of. 

meanwhile the field itself has a huge flock of fieldfares - a good 100-150 of them - marching towards the sun and feeding on insects and invertebrates in the grass. It looks like a military advance except they are not stealthy. So social when noisy, the ‘I’m here, where are you?’ chatter is so loud. They are getting ready to migrate I think.