One of the benefits of having the ground covered with snow is the picture it gives you of the local wildlife - and not so wild life. Animals leave traces in the snow of their daily, and nightly, activities.

Take the footprints on the right. We think this track was made across our courtyard by a pheasant. The chasse (the local hunt) has established a pheasant enclosure in the woodland near our house. The idea is that it's a safe, protected environment for the pheasants to breed and raise their young, so that they can fly off into the surrounding countryside and get their heads blown off there.

We often get pheasants on our land. The winding, apparently aimless track left by this bird confirms what we've always suspected: pheasants are stupid. The other thing that struck us about this track was how fake the imprints seem. It's as though someone has come along with a pheasant stamp.

There was more evidence of pheasant stupidity over at the enclosure itself. Above is the fence that runs around it. You can just make out the bird's track coming down from the top-right corner, outside the fence.

The bird reached the corner of the enclosure and made a right turn to continue following the fence. In the picture on the right you can see how it continued until, after about 100 metres of walking, it suddenly thought, "Wait a minute! I'm a fucking bird!" and took off.

The beating of its wings made a fascinating pattern. We saw this repeated on numerous occasions - strange little snow angels. Below is another - note the pattern on the right side of the picture. The other disruptions in the snow suggest there may have been some sort of encounter:

Others are not so easy to identify. We think the tracks in the left-hand picture below are those of a rabbit. The pairs of marks are the hind feet, the other two the front feet. In the right-hand picture, there seem to be at least two rabbits running the same path. Meeting this track is that of (we think) yet another pheasant. The line in the snow is caused by the dragging tail. Either this bird met the rabbits or encountered their trail. Either way, it decided flying was the safer bet.

Being small, Mini can find lots of interesting places to sleep. She's always liked climbing inside my bathrobe. Now she's discovered the sleeve is the snuggest place.

Most of our six cats hunt. Mini, our six month-old kitten is a savage killer and is busily decimating the vole, shrew and mouse populations of Normandy. When we came back from a week's holiday recently, there were six corpses in the living room and kitchen. According to the friends who were looking after the place, there were none the day before.

They're not all dead, though. Often Mini brings one in as a toy and plays with it until it breaks. Then she gets another.

When we hear that pathetic, high-pitched squeaking, or the chittering of a shrew, we do our best to rescue the poor critter. I'm not sure why, but it seems the right thing to do.

And so, the other night I found myself racing around the living room trying to corner a tiny mouse in which Mini had already lost all interest (she'd gone for a snack). I finally managed to grab it - not an easy feat given that I was wearing gardening gloves and it was one of the smallest mice I'd ever seen. Nevertheless, its heart was beating hard enough for me to feel it through the thick leather.

I stepped outside into total darkness. It was around 9pm, overcast and drizzling. Normally I would have walked across the courtyard and set the poor blighter free in the shrubbery, but I couldn't see where I was stepping and, with the gloves on, couldn't pluck my LED torch from my pocket. I reached down, close to the ground, opened my hand and ... felt the tiny animal run up my arm.

I was wearing a fisherman's jumper with crew neck (that's relevant - you'll see). It was hard to track the mouse's movement through the thick, loosely-knit wool, but I knew it had reached my shoulder. I didn't want to go back into the lighted living room because that would have been to deliver the mouse to a savage fate. Instead, I opened the door a crack and called for Trish, saying "bring a torch".

She did. In the meantime, though, I hadn't felt any movement. Trish searched me and declared me mouse-free. The brave little chap must have jumped, we thought, though a nagging doubt remained.

We watched an hour's TV, with me lying on the sofa as usual. Then we retired to the office where we blogged and surfed for perhaps another hour. Then back to the living room to prepare for bed - dog out, lights off, dog in, door locked. Anything else? It was while I stood going through the nightly checklist that I became aware of a new noise, a kind of rapid, high-pitched panting, very close and just behind me. I reached back over my left shoulder and explored my jumper. Sure enough, just below the neckline was a small bump.

"Trish," I called, "I don't think that mouse has gone."

She arrived, liberated the wee timorous beastie from my jumper and finally set it free. That was one lucky mouse - for now.

We thought it was insects, at least for the first two years. We kept finding the bark stripped from saplings and the fresh growth and buds nipped from the roses and other shrubs. But it was never enough damage to warrant serious countermeasures.

Then Trish did a little more research and roe deer became our prime suspect. And suddenly it all made sense.

We'd noticed that the areas of grass we allow to grow long under some of the mature trees had been flattened in places. We'd put this down to summer rainstorms and the antics of our dog, Zola. We'd also noticed trails in the grass coming under the barbed-wire fence. That'll be Scott, the neighbour's dog, we thought. We'd even seen some small shrubs flattened and bent. The dogs playing, we concluded.

To test the deer theory, I tried setting up a webcam in the office window, but its resolution was too low. Then, just a few days after we'd started suspecting deer damage, there he was.

I spotted him from the kitchen window in the dusk light. We scurried upstairs to the office and watched as he casually strolled the garden, nibbling a leaf here, a shrub there. I snapped a few pictures using a 300mm lens (equivalent to a 450mm on the digital camera) but he was at the far side of the garden, 100m away, and the light was now very low. So the pictures are a little blurry.

It's probably the same lone buck that has been causing the damage for the past three years. They rub against nice, springy saplings to relieve the itching in their antlers.

He's killed only a couple of trees, and those were self-seeded cherries, so no great loss. And his grazing does only superficial damage to the shrubs. So we're happy to share the garden with him.