What? June Already?

June has started with a walk in the woods with my daft dog, Polly. The air around our place is particularly wonderful at the moment. Its all fresh, warm and piney with the occasional waft of flowers. It is the sort of fresh air one wants in the house and compels me to open all the windows.
The gorse is in full bloom at the moment. It smells of coconut!The hawthorn is in bloom too. It makes hedgerows look as though they've been decorated for a June wedding. Old folklore says that hawthorn or Mayflower is unlucky and should not be brought into the house. I'm not bringing it in because there seem to be loads of tiny little flying insects crawling all over the blossoms.
There were lots of deer tracks in the soft mud. In one dried puddle I found deer, fox and pheasant tracks. When we first walked through the gate of the protected woods where the duck ponds are, we found loads of broken pheasant egg shells littering the road. It looks like crows have found a couple of unguarded pheasant nests and had an eggy feast.

Back on the road home and about 200 yards from the house I saw movement in the grass right next to the road. It was the wrong time of day for a hedgehog . . . It turns out it was a young rabbit. It froze and went very still in the grass, trying to not to be seen by us. As you can see, this rabbit didn't do a very good job of hiding. "I'm hiding! You can't see me!"
I managed to get very close. Polly (who isn't very bright sometimes) finally noticed the rabbit and went to have a sniff. When the dog got too close, the rabbit bolted. I called Polly off and the rabbit went unmolested into the woods. I hope this isn't a garden-eating rabbit and it stays well away. I must say that our garden is safe from rabbits as we have Polly the dog and Julio the cat. Both of these pets keep wild rabbits out of the garden. Our pet-free neighbours are less fortunate and have had to replant things a number of times already.