roe deer – Donich Website

Another good one

donich_admin — Sun, 19 Mar 2017 20:27:40 +0000

Definitely the best time of the year for wildlife. This little roe stag visited the webcam area around tea time and made a meal of part of one of our bushes (a very prickly one but they don’t seem to mind the thorns). You can see the velvet on his lovely new antlers

Click on the picture to see the video.

Where have all the flowers gone?

donich_admin — Sun, 21 Jun 2015 21:03:54 +0000

Looking out from my new office window (faces towards the front of the house, Lochgoilhead and Beinn Beulah whereas my old office faced to the rear and Beinn Donich), I saw a beautiful roe deer and her fawn. They munched some long grass (I desperately need to do some strimming but the midgies are awful at the moment) for a while and then started on the bed of primulas. I shoed them, but ten minutes later they were back….

It rather reminds me of the Saki story about the Prince who when faced with a choice between having flowers in his garden or pigs, went for the pigs, even though most people would have chosen differently…..

We have lots of young animals about at the moment – the other day I counted eight baby red squirrels chasing about by the feeder, and all the young birds have emerged from their nests. The young tits are very funny; they are as big as their parents, but really just balls of fluff. They can feed themselves at a pinch, but if they get a chance they will still flutter their wings and clatter their beaks to get their long suffering parents to give them fragments of fat ball. We also have loads of siskins now – they are feisty little things – more than capable of driving off chaffinches of twice their own size.

What I would really like to see would be a young badger, but if our pair do have cubs, they don’t seem to bring them for a share of the nightly peanuts.

Deer me….

donich_admin — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 15:52:37 +0000

Over the last few days we have had some new visitors – a female roe deer and her nearly grown fawn. We’ve had red deer in the garden many times, but I think these are our first roes, and they are very beautiful. Yesterday afternoon they were grazing on the back lawn (they seem to like eating fallen leaves more than grass), and then in the evening when we came back from shopping in Dunoon, they were down near the front hedge. I took a photo through the window, but the moment I started to open it to get a better shot they were off.

I am also pleased to report that our squirrels are back this week. It had been a while since we saw them, with I think the reason being that they were getting plenty of nuts elsewhere (down near the river I found loads of empty hazelnut shells which had obviously been nibbled on), but now that winter is here they obviously need a bit of a top up.