Share your recent wildlife encounters - large or small.
I haven’t had anything really spectacular for a while, but I live in a fairly tucked away spot in East Anglia and the last stretch to reach home is along a farm track with an open field alongside. When I drive home along this in the evenings - with headlights on - one of the brown hares that spend time in the field will run in towards the lights and then curve to run parallel with my car maybe 20m away. I don’t know why they do this, but I have found the same behaviour in the past too. I used to live and work on a coastal nature reserve. The drive on or off involved a couple of miles along an open shingle track and hares would frequently do exactly the same there if I crossed it in the evenings with headlights on. They would run in from the surrounding vegetated shingle. It seemed as though they were enjoying the ‘race’ - staying parallel with the Landrover for some hundreds of meters at a time before peeling off again.
One or two of the hares will visit our garden too later in the year - but they haven’t over the winter.
In addition to the previous urban/beach fox encounters I’ve mentioned, I was walking on the beach at sunset and there was no-one around. I looked up and there is a fox standing on top of a sand dune watching silhouetted against the car park lights behind it. I thought it was the perfect opportunity for a photo and tried to sneak my phone out but it turned and loped off.
I was just looking at some roe deer in the field out the back of our house which is a first for this year. Last month I saw a hen harrier at Wicken Fen, the sun set was spectacular and the silhouette of the hen harrier swooping around in front of the sun was a special moment.
