Off I trundled with B&B this afternoon, to our favourite permission: Hare Valley.
We poked about for a bit down at the bottom along the grassy margin between stubble and stream and disturbed a buzzard, which took off squawking behind the trees. I thought it looked on the small side, and then another buzzard appeared. It can be hard to keep in your mind's eye just how big adult buzzards are, and then you see one, and it's absolutely massive, and there's no doubt that the one you just saw was only half-grown. This adult flew out over the field in a semi-circle. I felt quite sure that we were under scrutiny, before it headed off down the valley, following its complaining offspring. I get the feeling that buzzards are no more keen on dogs than are jackdaws and seagulls.
After that it was hares. The wind was managing to bring the smell of large piles of chicken shit down the hill from the road to our left - 'tis the season of carting muck - even though it was blowing from behind us. I took it as a lesson to explain how the dogs sometimes pick up the scent of things that the wind direction indicates that they shouldn't, and tried to ignore the pong.
The smell of the three of us clearly got through the chicken shit, as Brains managed to get three hares moving just by standing still on a rise on the edge of the first meadow. We saw several others during the walk, and the last one was enormous. It ran a long way in full view, and was the same rust colour as the beautiful leveret of a couple of weeks ago, but I doubt it was her - I don't think a hare can grow that much in a little over a fortnight. The final tally was seven or eight - I was trying not to double count, but it can impossible to know for sure. And B&B were very good. Brains did start to chase a leveret that got up practically under her front feet, but I bellowed at her and she stopped.
Other than that, Brains disturbed a little flock of little birds, black against the sky. I thought they were perhaps goldfinches, but Merlin informed me they were linnets. Batshit just footled about and managed not to do anything stupid - in fact, she and Brains worked a very nice point and flush of a partridge in a hedge, and Batshit managed to behave with the appropriate decorum afterwards, rather than frantically trying to find out where the partridge had been for the previous half an hour of its life, or boinging about like an idiot. She seems to be finally learning from Brains that the previous half an hour is irrelevant, and that the idiot-boinging is just undignified.
As if to make up for this, when she got home she ate her dinner and then ran widdershins around the garden as if playing wall of death, before changing her mind and running back the other way.
Brains opted to ignore to this - she went and had a lie down.