Mandarin Duck #93

Once again we have been lucky with the weather. I checked yesterday afternoon after we got home to see if there were any spaces left for NT Dunham Massey and there were - hurrah. 
So we arrived dead on 11:30am and had a lovely couple of hours walking around the parkland. My plan was to try for the green woodpecker again as I know that they have definitely been seen, but we were out of luck - not even a sniff this time, so we then moved on to look for the deer. We got more than half way round the park before we came upon them and one of the rangers told us that there were two bucks fighting further round so we hurried to see if we could see them. In fact we heard the clatter of antlers before we saw them. It was amazing to watch. They looked to be quite young as there were plenty of other bucks around with more impressive antlers around, so maybe they were just practicing! You can see a shot of them in extras. This would have been my main blip had we not come across this lovely mandarin duck on one of the ponds on the way out.  I've never seen a wild one before, so it was great to see, although it wouldn't leave the side of the black headed gulls, until eventually someone got too close and it flew off. 

We arrived back at the car just as it started raining - good timing or what?!