Walberswick's whimsical wildlife

When we decided to come up to Suffolk, I started looking forward to long walks surrounded by wild foraging and ancient trees and a wonderful array of birds and wildlife. Out here, on the edge of the country, I mused, surely there would be some wild-ness?

Well, sort of. We've got apples (cookers and eaters) and blackberries and sloes and damsons and rosehips. We've got land cress and ground elder and a variety of lethal fungi. We've got wood pigeons and corvids and little tweeters and pied wagtails and magpies and blackbirds. There are many, many rabbits. Some of the trees, including one enormous pine, are splendid - but most are sycamores and silver birch. It's all lovely, is what I'm saying, but there's nothing much here that's out of the ordinary.

Apart from the pheasants. As the shooting season begins, Walberswick is amok with pheasants. They walk up and down the road, looking for all the world like Italians enjoying the passeggiatta. They roost in trees too flimsy to take their weight and, memorably, on the top of my neighbour's hedge, which is perhaps six feet high. They rattle and hoot and honk, sounding like a grumpy gang of cantankerous old codgers, then flap and fuss like old maids. Soon most of them will be dead, shot as part of the big commercial shoots that make these farmers a welcome chunk of cash each year. I'll miss them, funny strutting characterful little things. And then I'll eat them. Yum.

And the muntjac. Yesterday, me and the dog went for a route march, in the hope that she would stop trying to dig her way out of the kitchen in the middle of the night if she was physically exhausted, her little paws practically worn to stumps. As we were coming to the end of our walk – quite weary now, so going quite slowly and quietly – along the back lane, an adult muntjac deer crossed the lane ahead of us, no more than 12 feet away. It was so close I could almost smell it. There was another just behind it, but by then they'd caught our scent, and I knew that there was no point waiting quietly, hoping for another sighting. There's such a thrill in that moment, when you come face to face with something truly wild.

So I'm surrounded by a whimsical assortment of wildlife. Some of it I live with. Some of it isn't really wild. But out there, hidden among the brambles and the ferns, are all the creatures we read about as children. Knowing that, and hoping with my eternally childish heart to get another peek at Bambi and Thumper and, maybe, if I'm really lucky, proud Mr Badger, there will now be two walks a day. Poor dog.