A White Deer in the New Forest
Each week I hear of someone or other seeing Crossbills in the New Forest but everytime we are there we never see any, so today we decided it was time to have a proper look for them.
Milkham Enclosure near Bolderwood was our first choice of places to look and when we arrived at around 8.30am the wood was alive with birds. We didn't see any Crossbills at first and then just as we were heading back to the car I saw a couple of birds fly across to a tree in front of us. I looked through the binoculars and I could see a male Crossbill and then a female Crossbill, fantastic! We both had good views for well over 10 minutes. I thought seeing the Crossbills was probably as good as it was going to get today, but how wrong can you be.........
Walking in Bolderwood five minutes later we saw seven male Fallow Deer. Nothing strange about seeing Deer in the New Forest, except that one of them was a beautiful White Buck.
American Indians believed that catching a glimpse of a White Deer was the first step toward prosperity and good luck. I don’t know about that, but all I can say is that having seen lots of Deer over the years, that White Buck was truely a joy to see.
To finish off what was already a very special morning we decided to pop to Blashford Lakes.
We don’t always check out all the bird hides at Blashford as sometimes we just go for a walk in the woods but as we were feeling lucky we decided to have a look in each hide. Just as well we did as from each hide there was a new bird for the year list!
siskins
Gadwall from hide one, Siskins from hide two and a male Garganey from the third hide. We wouldn't have spotted the Garganey ourselves, but a very nice man pointed it out to us and let us have a look through his scope. What a great morning, four new birds and a very special white deer......it really couldn't get much better than this!
88. crossbill
89. gadwall
90. siskin
91. garganey
4 comments:
How exiting was that, the white buck is beautiful, I bet it made your day or I should say week.
Love the site keep up the good work
Hi Eve Crossbills Lucky you I have yet to see one.If the Brent are still around and you notice any with big identity rings on would you send me details of place colour of ring Letter on each ring (so for example K4-WW would be left leg K right leg 4 and both white rings.)
Wow white deer, I didn't know you could get white deer! Fantastic!
I hope Rich and I see a white deer when we move to the New Forest!
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