Running south from the old Barbrook reservoir, I found myself struggling against the strong south-westerly that had kept temperatures unusually high for several days and delayed wintering thrushes returning to the moors. The arrival of fieldfares and redwings is always sparkling compensation for the gloomy approach of winter but I would have to wait a little longer. At least the sun was out, turning the sprung shoulders of a kestrel to a vibrant caramel as it quartered the brook below me.
Almost as I reached the Baslow road the sunlight picked out a red deer stag standing tall some distance away, antlers raised, breath steaming from its flared nostrils. At the same time I caught sight of another beast advancing towards the stag with an enormous-lensed camera held to his eye.
Red deer are skittish and with the wind in the right direction can smell a human from 500 metres away. These moors, six square miles on the limits of Sheffield, support a population of 168 deer, according to the Eastern Moors Partnership’s most recent census.
There can be few British herds in such proximity to a large city but they seem to have adjusted. The cabs of lorries passing me would have made a fine vantage point from which to glimpse the autumn rut. The photographer, on the other hand, came a metre too close and the stag dropped a shoulder and wheeled away.
I got out my binoculars but by the time I had the ground in view again the photographer had vanished, spooked perhaps by the disapproval of more distant walkers who had also been admiring the superbly antlered male and the 40 or so hinds in his harem. Off to one side two more males were lurking hopefully, although the season now was drawing to a close.
A bolving competition, when humans imitate the throaty, booming, roar of a stag hoping to provoke a response, was planned for the following weekend, the autumn’s last exchange between one species that has learned toleration for the curiosity of the other.
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