AS I MADE my way across golden-speckled buttercup meadow by the edge of the Ochils, a handsome roe buck materialised before me.

He looked magnificent with his foxy summer coat and two small upright pronged antlers. The roe deer rut begins in mid-July and lasts until the end of August – a time when the testosterone fuelled buck will closely follow a doe for several days, waiting for the opportunity to mate.

Once mating has occurred, egg implantation is delayed until early January and the two fawns are born the following summer, completing the circle of life for another year.

Roe bucks are noisy creatures during the mating season and bark like a dog.

I particularly enjoy the experience recounted by the early 20th century naturalist Frances Pitt when she dozed off in a Scottish forest.

“I sat down with my back to a pine stump and the forest world faded from me – or rather I was back in an earlier epoch when primitive man with a wolfish dog hunted beneath the pines,” she wrote.

“Wouf, wouf, barked the dog, and I woke to realisation of an actual sound. Was a dog barking at me? No, it was a roe buck - a picture of puzzled curiosity, staring intently at me and uttering his bark of mingled surprise and alarm.”

Pitt’s reference to times past is most appropriate, for the "wouf, wouf" of our barking roes would have been as familiar a sound to our forebears as the howl of the wolf or the cry of the lynx.

I often see roe deer on my early morning walks by the edge of the Ochils; the tell-tale flashes of their fleeing white rumps being easy to detect in the rising light of dawn.

Typically, a retreating roe will stop after a hundred yards or so to take one last look at the person that disturbed its grazing – a natural curiosity they seem unable to contain.

Stoats do the same. One will quickly scoot into the sheltered confines of a drystone dyke or other crevice if disturbed by a walker.

But if you wait a minute or two, the stoat just can’t resist the temptation to come out of its hidey-hole to have a quick peek at what panicked it in the first place. Curiosity killed the cat, but perhaps the same adage can be applied to roe deer and stoats.

Roe deer are normally regarded as woodland animals but in the Ochils they quite happily take to the open hill, especially during the summer.

But such behaviour is the exception rather than the rule as the roe normally likes to be close to cover for shelter during the day.