Stag fright.

Expect the unexpected in October?  Well, during this morning’s stroll along the Dyke I was fully prepared for a vagrant warbler, had dutifully scanned the newly arrived fieldfares for something a little more Siberian, and was braced at any moment for one of the burgeoning local bunting flock to give me a ‘tic’; however, I wasn’t prepared for the undergrowth to rustle ominously before disgorging the closest thing to megafauna that this country possesses.  Two bloody great red deer stags emerged from the scrub, took a brief look at my startled expression, and bottled it completely.  They pegged it, out across the fields and away westwards, giving me little time to unsling a camera and get some sort of distant blurry record shot of the event.

Red on the left, roe on the right, for scale.