 |
| Approach and retreat |
Roe deer are a common sight in the fields in front of our house. Sometimes they wander into the garden. Usually they just amble around browsing, entering and leaving the garden with a graceful flowing curve over the fence. Lovely to see but nothing dramatic. That changed yesterday. A pair have been visiting the garden quite often recently. Yesterday a second buck appeared. The first buck chased it out in the field where they stopped and faced each other.
 |
| Clash! |
A tense battle then ensued. The two bucks faced each other, often lowering their heads, and several times charged and locked antlers. Slowly one backed away, losing a little ground with each tussle. Eventually they moved out of sight.
 |
| Standoff |
We watched all this through the kitchen window, a privilege of living here. Then I went up to my study for a better view as they moved further away and took some photos through the window.
We’d never seen this exciting and dramatic behaviour before. Hopefully neither of the bucks was seriously injured.
Photo note: I took the photos through my closed study window with the Sony 70-350mm lens at 350mm (equivalent to 525mm full frame). I was shooting handheld but as the day was quite bright I didn’t have to up the ISO much to keep a high shutter speed. Settings were ISO 400 and 1/1600 second at f6.3. I cropped the photos as the deer were far enough away that they were still small in the pictures. The raw images were processed in DXO PhotoLab 7
 |
| Uncropped image |
No comments:
Post a Comment