Dramas great and small

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/30/country-diary-dramas-big-and-small

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Through the hedge on the path to the marsh I could hear their commotion. Sharp-tipped hooves stabbing the ground and then a telltale blur of orange flanks that revealed them as Chinese water deer. Males squared up in combat.

As my binoculars dialled into crisp detail, they answered a long-standing mystery. For years I’ve found handfuls of loose deer hair strewn on the ground, but was always puzzled why it was shed in that fashion. Here was the answer.

The males possess long canines in the upper jaw that slot either side of the closed mouth like fangs. Each buck, facing his opponent, feinted and jinked for the opening to land its charge, until one would finally dash at the other.

The rushes were ferocious. The assailant often performed full somersaults over its rival, rolling back upon back, legs flailing down in an instant search for new purchase. And once it landed, the deer would curve around the head of its enemy, gouging its teeth into the other’s flank. Fur flew.

One finally yielded, but not before they had rested in unison, slack mouths wide open, hard-breathed, red-gummed, and those fangs of these deer of such sweet mien momentarily suggested nothing less than something sabre-toothed and predatory.

It had all unfolded to the iambic heart-pounded rhythm of sex, but the next day at Blackwater I encountered a drama whose denouement was but 2cm across, yet it contained a poetry that was darker, harder and more fertile.

We were looking for spiders when one of us came upon a dead dung fly with its legs hugged entirely round a blade of grass. Bizarrely, the abdomen curved back and up, but the head was forward and down as if a fly were bowing in abject submission.

Its whole body glistened with something like sugar frosting, the spores of mould called Entomophthora. Over seven days, it consumes the fly within, and then by some biochemical trick, fashioned through the millennia, it persuades the fly brain to die in an attitude best suited to the dispersal of its spores.