With no nearby rarities for me to make a present of/drag Marion along to (delete where applicable) we decided to celebrate our 11th wedding anniversary with a trip to the New Forest and have lunch at the Fighting Cocks, an excellent pub/restaurant at Godshill, right on the edge of the open areas of the forest.
I also suggested we might manage to see eleven species of mammal to mark the occasion. Marion as we were leaving home shouted "dog!" and when I remonstrated that it was uncountable, she suggested she would count domestics and I could count wild mammals.
Seconds later we passed two pedestrians considering a dead cat in the road and we decided to list roadkill mammals as well: so off we went doing three separate day lists.
By the time we left Moor Green I had not seen a wild mammal. Marion had added cat and horse and was chortling; the road surface had yielded rabbit, brown rat, grey squirrel and badger.
We took the A303 from Basingstoke and stopped at Bransbury. By then I had at last managed to get off the mark with a live Grey Squirrel bouncing across the village green at Hartley Wintney. However, the hares and roe deer I expected on the broad fields were keeping a low profile and by midday when we arrived at the Fighting Cocks Maz had added sheep, donkey and cow; brown hare and red fox had been added to the roadkill list and I was trailing on one.
We were doing quite well on raptors. I had picked up Sparrowhawk before we set off, Moor Green had given us Buzzard and Kestrel, and a Red Kite was wheeling over the M3 near Basingstoke. I had also had a Wheatear fly off a gate near Barton Stacey.
Anyway, the pub was excellent as usual. Well cooked sensible food in birders' portions and I allowed myself one pint of Hobgoblin in good condition.
Afterwards we staggered back to the car well stuffed - and I was feeling well stuffed on the mammal front. Time to start fighting back. Fallow Deer was the first target. I headed for Deadman Hill and nearby found half a dozen Fallow does sunning themselves in the open end of Black Gutter Bottom. They were distant so we drove down to Bolderwood, arriving at about 1410. There were a few Fallow does at the deer viewing place, but nothing like the numbers of a few weeks earlier: persumably many, including the bucks, had headed into the forest in preparation for the rut. By 1430 the feeder hadn't turned up so we left to check out the bog where the Red Deer hang out.
We had a nice walk up through the still green beech woodland to the edge of the bog, where a huge Red stag with eight hinds and a this year's calf were moving slowly away from a hiker couple who were trying and failing to stalk them. Moving slowly and carefully in the shady edge of the trees I got my camera set up without disturbing them further and got some reasonable shots before they heard another family approaching with dogs from our side of the bog and slid away into the trees in a definite and final sort of way. Three species.
By now it was 1530 and we decided to make a move towards home, with a small diversion to Greywell for a look at the fields out on the chalk. Finally that produced the Brown Hare I had looked for in the morning, and in seeing that I caused a Rabbit to bolt and added that as species number five.
Home, cup of tea, a few minutes consideration a to how to proceed.
At 1830 we set off again, first of all to settle the account of probably the easiest, most widespread deer in England. I stopped at the roadside by what I think of as the deer field, and to my surprise and delight there were three Fallow Deer - two does and a this year's fawn - they are pretty difficult hereabouts and these were my first local ones of the year. No Roe Deer though.
On we went, down past the back of Fleet Services where sometimes a Muntjac scurries across: not today. Under the railway and in the field on the right, jackpot: a Roe doe and her fawn of this year, grazing peacefully in rough grass and rushes. Six, and really I reckoned it was in the bag now.
A few minutes later we parked up on the steep verge by the Basingstoke Canal and set off along the towpath. As we ducked under the road bridge we had just driven over, my bat detector went a bit mental and in nearly full daylight we had good views of a Soprano Pipistrelle, our seventh wild mammal of the day. A quick look at the sett suggested the Badgers were still below ground so we continued to the fields across the next bridge where with the bat detector turned right up and stuck next to my ear I found there was at least one Noctule somewhere fairly close by. Eventually it came over us and that was number eight sorted.
We returned to the sett and while we waited for the stripy mustelids, I tuned the detector to 45 KHz and immediately discovered that although it was anything but dark the Daubenton's Bats were already skimming the surface of the canal and that was us with nine mammals under the belt, getting good views near the far bank with the nightscope.
After that we had all of five minutes wait until a Badger was regarding our whispering forms from the top of the opposite bank and the plan allowed us to make our way back to the car.
We drove round a few Fleet housing areas looking for foxes and clanged out, but they are common and not exactly elusive at home so we didn't panic. We were most of the way home, near the roundabout with the replica Gloster E28/39 on it, when a big bushy adult Red Fox became the eleventh wild mammal of our eleventh wedding anniversary by bounding across the road with his brush waving jauntily.
Home and Moet.
John