Deer identification charts tend to focus on the rump, since that's mostly what you see as they run away from you. In wooded areas, however, you rarely see them at all: you hear a sudden commotion and crashing in the undergrowth adjacent to the path, and assume that you have disturbed a large animal which -- since there's nothing else large enough to make all that noise -- must be a deer. Just occasionally, however, your luck is in, and if you halt on the fringes of the woodland, keeping to the shadows, you can see them in the open ground beyond.
We were lucky twice on our walk across Creech Heath towards the Blue Pool, meeting fallow deer -- identifiable as such by the white spots on their backs -- on both occasions. When watched through binoculars, there is something permanently skittish about their behaviour: their heads are up, their ears erect, their little black eyes seeming to look straight at you, one front leg being repeatedly lifted and lowered. When they do decide to flee, they all move at once, as though they've reached a collective decision rather than being spooked by a single individual. But for the minutes before they decide that the new patch of shadow on the edge of the woods is a human, they can be observed contentedly grazing the heather, shepherding their fawns, and nuzzling one another's necks.
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