They made us work for it…

Autumn is my favourite time of year for photography, I love the cool crisp mornings and the beautiful autumnal colours, it is also the time of year for the annual deer rut which sees the male deer battle it out for dominance over a harem of females for the rights to mate. This is one of those events that I have marked on the calendar to see and photograph, however, this year, for various reasons, I will be out of action when the rut is in full swing during October. Thankfully for me, I managed to get out to the peak district towards the end of September, with Ash Barnard, for a full day of photography, with the aim to photograph the red deer that call these moors home.

The day started early, as in a 4am wake-up call to leave by 5am (I do a lot of faffing in the morning) to meet Ash on site at 7:30 am. It was a beaut of a day for it, with cloud inversions surrounding the hills around our location. Ash had arrived to site early and had some luck first thing, getting the stags calling, so I was hopeful that they’d still be around.

We did see some deer, that were scattered around and tried our best to get into a decent position. This proved to be quite hard due to the wind spinning around in circles, wafting our sent around the place, and the deer being very skittish. The deer moved on down the valley and as the day was getting hot, we decided to head back to the cars and move onto a national trust site to see if we’d have any luck with the wildlife there.

There was a lot of walking here in the heat (it was a 25˚c+ day) with no luck on the photography side. We stopped in some woods, after hearing and seeing a lot of action on the small birds front, the hope was that if we put out some hazelnuts that Ash had with him, we could make our own luck and get the birds coming to us. While there was some promise first thing with a brief visit from a Jay, who inconveniently landed on the back side of the tree so we could get no clear images, everything was quiet – opening the merlin bird ID app quiet. We couldn’t see the cause for the sudden loss of bird life, but can only assume a predator was nearby.

We continued our walk and found another site with promise, we could see both green woodpeckers and jays flying around the place, so once again set out some hazelnuts in the hopes of getting a jay come in. We braved the heat, and 3D camo’d up to do another sit and wait, which had much the same outcome as before, with no birds coming in.

Luckily for us, this site had a duck pond, so we headed there in the hopes of getting at least something in the memory cards. The pond was very low, so we were able to find a dry bit right next to the water and get some rather lovely images of the juvenile moorhens. There were some mandarin ducks on the pond also, but unfortunately a dog walker scared them off the water and into the thick undergrowth surrounding the pond.

If there is one thing you can rely on at a national trust site, that is ice cream from the café, so after we had our fill at the pond, we got a magnum each to cool off. We also hatched our next plan, to go and try and find a spot where we might see some owls. This was then promptly interrupted en route as we saw a good sized herd of deer near to the road, so we pulled over and tried our luck one more time to see if we’d get any closer and get some images.

This time we went light weight and just took the cameras. I swapped into my spare long sleeve T-shirt, so my bright white arms wouldn’t alert the deer. The wind was now in our favour, so we took a long, slow approach, we were crawling along on our bellies at one point, but eventually we got into position and had an amazing 12 minutes with the deer. It was amazing to be close to a group of properly wild deer, the deer I have photographed in the past have been on estates or in deer parks where they are very much used to humans being around pointing cameras at them.

After the deer, we did try and find some owls, but with the light falling and a long drive home, we called it a day.

I had an absolutely wonderful, well needed day out with Ash. While we struggled early on in the day, our persistence paid off, and we got a great encounter with the deer and some lovely images.

I want to end this post with a tick warning. If you are rolling around in the grass/heather/ferns/general undergrowth in the British countryside, then at some point your path will cross with ticks. I was lucky enough to come home with no ticks at all, but poor Ash ended up with about 7 that had latched on to him and needed to be removed. I carry tick hooks with me in my camera bag, just in case, and you can pick them up easily online or at your local vets, or pet shop. You can find out more about ticks here.