Sunshine.

What a beautiful day for October!

To make the most of the sunshine we went to College Lake, a reclaimed quarry taken over by Beds, Bucks and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust. It's a great place to go if you don't want a long walk but want to get out into the countryside. There was a bit of a lack of birds but we still had a lovely time there.

Had a quick M for lunch, then decided as the sun was still shining beautifully we would go to Woburn as we weren't far away.

First had a drive around the deer park which was fantastic. It's rutting time so it seemed that all of the male deer were really giving it their all - the noise from them was fantastic. A lot of the female deer didn't look wildly impressed though!

We then went into the safari park there and were delighted to see this baby elephant which we had not heard had been born so it was a lovely surprise and he / she is so sweet. I since found out she was born on 1stOctober so is only 10 days old but already so bold and ready to play - mainly with large lumps of elephant poo!! Continued around the park into the bear and wolf enclosure and the bears were being fed (by a keeper in a jeep) with large fish. This alone was great to watch but even more interesting were the large number of red kites circling and trying to pinch some bear dinner- we think we counted 20 red kites at one point - totally spectacular! The rest of the park was lovely too but nothing could beat our first two encounters - and all from the luxury of the car!