Fallow deer – From Pyrenees to Pennines

The Eyes Have It

In this week’s Nature Photo Challenge #2, Denzil has us hunting for eyes. That’s a bit tough, isn’t it, photos of eyes?

We’ll go back to last week’s peacock for a bit of help:

And there’s another kind of peacock who can help us: a peacock butterfly.

Here’s another butterfly with eyes to dismay predators: a Gatekeeper.

Since I’ve never been to the Amazonian Rainforest, I’ve never seen an Owl Butterfly in its natural habitat. But they have circled round me at the Butterfly House of London’s Horniman Museum, unnerving me with all those ‘eyes’ they have..

After all these dissembling eyes, it seems only fair to show two real ones. The header photo shows a fallow deer at Knole, Kent, and here is an elephant at Dubare Elephant Camp on the River Cauvery in India.

A Window to the Soul?

It’s been a strange Not-Quite-Christmas – in our case quite an enjoyable one, and today I’m going to offer a Not-Quite-Monday-Win do w. Why not? Eyes, it’s said, are the windows to your soul, and we saw plenty of eyes when we visited Knole Park the other Christmas with Team London. Those eyes belonged to some rather over-friendly sika deer. I’m not clear about whether deer have souls, but they they certainly provided a different sort of window through which we could remember our visit. Here’s a picture of me with my son and his son, as seen through the eyes of a passing deer.