Stoatal fail

"Look!" I said to R, pointing, "a weasel! No, a stoat!" as I saw the distinctive black tip to its tail. We were walking up the carriage drive at Charlecote, and the stoat was no more than ten feet away from us, running between two of the trees that line the drive. We watched, enchanted, and it was only as it neared the second tree that it suddenly occurred to me I had a camera hanging from one shoulder. By the time I'd lifted it and found the creature, it was disappearing behind the trunk. "Where is it?!" I said desperately. "Has it come out the other side?" R took a few steps back. "I don't think so," he said. "Wait - yes! It's going up the trunk. Oh! It's gone."

I tried to comfort myself with the thought that this incident (which R, who likes to think he's funny, referred to as a "stoatal fail") showed that I'm someone who's at least as interested in the wildlife as she is in the photography. Which is good, because all of us who've been at this game for  a while have met some people with their priorities set the other way round, and I definitely don't want to be preceded by the kind of reputation they have. But that didn't mean I didn't spend the rest of the walk grinding my teeth, and occasionally wailing "Stoat though! I mean... stoat!!!"

So anyway, instead of the stoat I might have brought you, had I been a bit less dozy, here is one of this summer's Fallow Deer fawns. They always look a bit maungy to me (though it was probably in a sunnier mood than I was by this point), but they're still quite endearing in their fluffy, Bambi-spotted coats.

Stoat though! Grrr....