I am obsessing about trees at the moment so this shot seems appropriate, however opportune it is in terms of composition – it’s just a pile of logs happened upon while getting my dose of fresh air medicine today and it has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m going to say!

I was idly looking out of the bedroom window this morning, when I saw a wabbit travel up our road at the speed of light. It was going so fast that it was surely being chased or otherwise terrified. A couple of moments later, another critter appeared in the road. A small, slim brown thing about the size of a squirrel, with a fat black fluffy tail and a white throat. A stoat. Ah that explains the flight of the rabbit then.

The stoat had a mooch around the road, hopped up onto the top of the dry stone wall that’s our front boundary, checked out the front garden thoroughly then hopped back off the wall, into the road and disappeared into the undergrowth on the other side. We were still standing there, completely enthralled by what we’d just seen in our front garden, when another rabbit shot out of the undergrowth, up our front path and into our garden.

This time the rabbit was hotly pursued by the stoat, who was doing this incredible bouncing run jumping a good eighteen inches or more off the ground with every pace. He really was trying to look huge to the rabbit despite actually being rather smaller.

We don’t know what happened next – did the rabbit escape or did the stoat get a good meal from it? I reckon the rabbit’s only chance of escape was to out-run the stoat because any burrow it could get down, the stoat could too and anywhere it could jump to, so could the stoat.

In my entire forty-odd years of life, I’d never seen a stoat until this year. Today’s display was something I consider myself privileged to have witnessed even though as anyone who’s a regular here knows, I have a real soft spot for rabbits and can’t bear the thought of one becoming lunch for a hungry stoat.

Last year's agitating balls no longer agitate because I've lost one of them!!!