What I saw while I was out (a general purpose nature or whatever thread)

I almost got trampled by cows once, do not recommend.

Same here - just made it over a gate before 20 interested young males clattered into it behind me.

Was talking to someone recently who works with cattle. They'd found a calf abandoned in a sluiceway near a river. He jumped in to rescue it and managed to pull it out but the mother had obviously observed and came over to register her disapproval - which resulted in her knocking the calf back into the river and jumping up and down on the poor ranger's chest. He managed to roll away into the river, but not before she'd severed a finger, punctured a lung and broken his leg. Scary shit.

And Branwell, your Highland sojourn sounds glorious. I love it up there.

Ack! Ack! Oh no don't tell me terrible coo stories, coos are gentle and noble and wise creatures in my mind.

That said, no creature on this green earth is kind nor gentle when they have their wee young with them.

Now I am back, I have ordered the Merlin Sheldrake mushroom book!

The colours of the Highlands! I just can't get over them! Especially in the autumn, with the rowan trees going mad with berries and the bracken going all orange and gold. And blooming purple heathers! To match the purple-green mountains! I've just planted some heather in my little concrete yard, to remind me of the Highlands but heather always just dies on me. :(

I am trying to console myself with the reminder that it is now leafing season, and there will be lots of fun to be had, even in London, in striding through crunchy drifts of golden-orange-brown leaves with all the delightful SWISH! SWISH! SWISH! noises and textures. Yes.

I think some of it has to do with how the cows are fed? Shortly before my almost-trampled experience, I lived in France in a house right next to a cow pasture. Those cows were grass-fed, so they didn't see people as a source of food, and the only way you could even get them to come near you was by lying down on the ground - at which point they would slowly approach and you would be surrounded by big gentle questioning faces and maybe one of them would be brave enough to give you a tentative lick. So when I was walking in England, I came to a place where the path cut through a cow pasture and confidently kept going, only to have a bunch of young males come charging up to me looking for food.

Christ but my local patch is busy right now - the paths through the woods are fucked with mud because of it, basically shin-deep in most places. Consequently, I've found myself searching out new paths; I don't know how, as I've been walking these woods for years, but I found a new patch of woodland today. I caught a flock of redwings and fieldfares chattering in the trees. Amazing.

Also, there's a bloke who walks his dogs who looks a shit of a lot like Debussy.

I'm still nervous about going too much off the beaten path after getting attacked by a swarm of wasps a few years back whilst listening happily to R3 and drinking a can and suddenly I'm wearing a layer of wasps down the backs of my legs and my kid is screaming, well not exactly nervous but just not confident and relaxed about walking through thick undergrowth in woods any more. Some arsehole landowner has put up extra barbed wire at a point where their field intersects with the path and some woods. I brought my sharpest cable croppers out to remove the barbed wire but another walker had already done the job for me .. respect to whoever it was!

Ooof, that's a bit much. Yeah, bugger that although #notallwasps.

And yeah, fucking barbed wire. Was walking along a path today, totally wrecked with mud and you could totally see that people would need to reach out for support and only be able to grab onto... barbed wire. They're only protecting shitty grass, ffs!

I saw what I thought was a lapwing yesterday. I got my bins out and realised it was a blackbird, but with an almost purely but weirdly craggy white head - like it had been dipped in Artex.

I bumped into a foxhunt today. There were 3 or 4 riders with the hounds including the dickhead with the bugle. And then a bunch of laggards about a mile behind, one of which fell off their horse onto solid concrete. Country drama, innit!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FKW0BmRXsAMpcGm?format=jpg&name=4096x4096

this was taken just before one of these arseholes was unseated onto hard road, which made my day tbh

I helped a grass snake across the road today. I must have looked mental from a distance - some bald bloke, arms stretched in a mid-air cuddle, moving across the road crab-wise. The snake was coiled up right under my nose and I didn't see it until it started moving. Must have been 3/4 of a metre long. Amazing.

A few weeks ago while out walking I saw my brother in law idly stroking a nettle. What the hell are you doing? I asked. He said they don't sting when they're in flower - it was a proper stinging nettle with the tiny dangling strings of flowers, not a red or white dead nettle. Very nervously I gave it a go, and he seemed to be right, and I tested it a couple of times on other days. Yesterday I was doing some clearing in the garden and suddenly noticed I'd been stung - by a flowering nettle. Now I don't know what to think. I haven't found any other references on the internet to this hypothesis.

There's a donkey maybe 3/4 of a mile away from me as the crow flies, on a smallholding at the edge of some disused farmland. His occasional braying comes loud and clear when it's quiet and the wind is in the right direction and I've come to think of it as a kind of Taoist chant, a reminder of the loneliness and absurdity of existence. He's a feisty wee number and comes barrelling over whenever I walk past the fence adjoining his land. I gave him a parsnip the last time I saw him and asked him to keep up the good work.