Wildlife

This evening we are camped in another vineyard near to the small town of Houga. The ground is mowed as flat as a bowling green and well kept and nearby there is a rift in the ground with a great badger set at the bottom. The ground around the set is freshly turned so it is active but on a road nearby I saw the sadly mangled corpse of another badger. One wonders if they were from the same family.

This morning when I awoke there was a pile of fresh deer droppings right next to my tent so the beast must have been no more than a metre from my tent in the night. The night before that Jeremy reported encountering several hedgehogs as he went out for a pee in the night and the signs of boars, and indeed their sounds of grunts and crashing about in the maize fields are evident all over.

In the forest we passed a few days ago the trees were filled with the noise of either very big crickets or possibly cicadas although I wasn't lucky enough to see any of those magnificent bugs. Even now I can hear grasshoppers and frogs.

We have seen many deer at varying distances. They usually look at us curiously for a few moments and bound away, white tails flashing an alarm.

This countryside is filled to bursting with life that takes so little effort to see when one walks but flying past in a car presents so few opportunities to see and enjoy these sights and sounds that it would seem a shame to do it now.