29-Aug August's Animal Encounters

If you are downwind and quiet, young foxes will often come quite close to investigate, but once they catch your scent they invariably decide to leave. With such little experience, many young mammals fall prey to other animals or are killed on our roads.

It is now ‘fat buck’ season when bucks are at their prime with all the excellent grazing. Fallow deer antlers are reaching their maximum size and you may see some with pieces of velvet still left on which they are trying to rub off.

Compared with red deer, fallow are not so nervous so you sometimes get a glance of the fawns. They leap a lot and chase each other, particularly just before dusk. No two bucks have identical horns and their size and shape are dependent on a variety of factors. Genes and food supply are two you might expect, but stress and injury can also play a part. Two year olds are called ‘prickets’ and simply possess a pair of straight horns. When three years old they develop small, pointed horns called tines. Another year sees the tops of their horns getting a little wider and more toothed. In the ‘bare buck’ or five year old there is further widening which can now be called palmation. In their sixth year they are called ‘bucks’ and in their seventh ‘great bucks’. A great buck has a simply splendid set of palmate horns which may have developed further tips or ‘snags’. Finally at the grand age of eight years the deer is at last an ‘adult’ and may now be carrying horns weighing as much as four kilograms.

Red deer are similar to fallow in that their horns may now be reaching their maximum size. The red deer we see in London parks tend to be heavier, with larger antlers and more tines. In wild populations you rarely see a stag with more than 14 tines but in Richmond park you may see up to 20, in other deer parks even 40. Park deer also tend to mate and give birth a little earlier.

One of the most picturesque sights of August has to be the rare view of a roe hind crossing a woodland ride with her twins. In hot weather, if pestered by flies, the family is sometimes seen in more open areas and occasionally they choose bedding places on warm slopes. Elsewhere the bucks start the rut in late July and when they now encounter a hind there is some throaty rasping to which she may reply with a shrill squeak. The rut lasts a month during which the hinds are endlessly followed by the bucks. Courtship involves constantly running in circles or figures of eight in designated areas which are called ‘rings’. As few people ever saw deer behaving in this way, these ‘rings’ were believed to be where fairies chose to dance during the night.

This month young foxes start to disperse. Two cubs will often stay together spending most of their time in thick undergrowth. Young cubs still have woolly ears and a mask beneath and between their eyes. As they get a little older this mask gets longer and more distinct. By the time they disperse their ears are much bigger and will now be standing upright.

Their faces will also have developed distinct cheek marks. Cubs tend to start off greyish-brown in colour, although some are occasionally born chocolate. By September these colours will have changed to more of a yellow-brown and it will be a further six months before the dog fox has developed its familiar red and white colours. The vixen is slightly greyer.

Badgers are highly protective about their families and have even been known to block their burrows and face any badger-diggers alone. There are several accounts of badgers even burying their dead. These are always thought to be their mates and the eerie howls that accompany this activity never seem to be forgotten by those that have heard them.

Badger families are still all together and a feature of the month is often new holes and fresh diggings around setts. Cubs are largely responsible for these as they are now learning to excavate holes. Occasionally the whole family will decamp and move to another sett in their territory, making them even more difficult to find and observe. If it is a dry August, earthworms will burrow deeper and badgers may turn to more unusual food sources such as wasp nests. These they are quite capable of destroying with impunity. On hot nights they may even choose to sleep outside. Although usually silent, family life in August involves a lot of scuffling and occasionally some sexual excitement as they also mate this month. This means you may hear rarer vocalisations such as boars yelping when in the company of sows.