A Glimpse of Spring

This week has started and finished with cold winds and snow showers. Fortunately the days in between have been glorious.

In response to this, we've been marching all over the place looking for fox dens. Strangely, we haven't found anything despite checking a lot of likely areas.

Either these foxes are thin on the ground this year, or they're getting a whole lot smarter. I hope it's the former because they were quite fly enough as they were.

As you can see, we've spent a lot of the week on steep, rough ground. It's the sort of terrain that foxes love and ankles hate. And in that heat, it wasn't just the terriers whose tongues were hanging out!

On a different tack, the trout season has just started up here. For an opening gambit, one of my colleagues took an evening on the loch. He hooked into something BIG and played it for 15 minutes before it got its head down and took his line into the weed.

It's the second time that's happened to him, whereas I have never had anything bigger than 1lb out of that loch. Mind you, I suppose neither has he!

The same lad had a guest out looking for Roe Buck on Wednesday. Try as they might, nothing worked for them and they returned empty-handed. Wouldn't you know it, I went out for 20 minutes that evening and had one of the best bucks of my career.

Actually, that should be 'one of the best bucks of my car- eer.' And when I skelpit the poor beast with our trusty old VW, career it did. When I came to a juddering halt, the buck lay dead on the road before me. And on the road behind me lay an unbelievable amount of broken plastic. Expensive, broken plastic....