September 2021 - Cooling down

I always enjoy seeing animals do something that I don’t expect! Bushy Park is a great place to go to – the trees, the ‘ponds’ (a lot bigger than the one in your back garden), the streams, the birds, the deer, sunshine … well, that last isn’t guaranteed, but the rest are. 

I love going there just to see what takes my fancy – it may be a heron standing stock still in one of the streams, waiting for a small fish to come by and to become a mouthful. And the deer are just as capable of being good for portraits – this red deer was clearly suffering from the heat and had decided to go for a paddle in the pond.

And that is something I have only seen once before – I guess we will be seeing it more and more as our climate warms up. Looking at the photo, it seems to be well composed – but I have just noticed that there is a pole growing out of the deer’s back. That’s the sort of thing that I find easy to miss when I take a photo – I’m concentrating too much on the main subject and not looking to see what is all around. Maybe if I’d waited a minute or two there would have been more obvious separation between the pole and the deer. Another lesson to remember!