Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Irish muntjac – myth or menace?
The tiny muntjac has an outsized environmental impact and sightings on the island of Ireland are causing alarm, explains Barry Stoffell
The wild deer wandering here and there,” wrote William Blake in Auguries of Innocence, “doth free the human soul from care.” While undoubtedly true in many instances, this line does rather suggest that while he may have been a poet and painter par excellence, he didn’t make his living from trees or crops.
In fairness to Blake, back in the first decade of the 19th century, when the poem was penned, Britain had not yet seen the introduction of either the Japanese sika or the muntjac. Later in the century both arrived, thrived and are now firmly established. But just a short hop across the Irish Sea, the situation is somewhat different – while sika were introduced in 1860 by the seventh Lord Powerscourt to his estate in County Wicklow, the muntjac remained foreign to these shores. Until recently, that is. Over the past decade there have been a number of confirmed sightings of this diminutive deer, adding to growing concern that a feral population is not only present on the island of Ireland, but is now breeding.
A successful pest
While muntjac may have first set foot on British soil as early as 1838, they were not introduced in significant numbers until the 1890s, by the Duke of Bedford at Woburn Park. A few years later, a number were released into the surrounding woodland and the rest, as they say, is history. A little over a century later, they are now widespread throughout much of England, with a more limited presence in Wales. There are increasing reports of muntjac sightings in Scotland – an issue of no little concern to Scottish Natural Heritage – and it would appear that no country on mainland Britain can claim to be muntjac-free.
As many readers will be painfully aware, this small deer can be big trouble. As seasonal breeders, their mating activity is not confined to an annual rut and most muntjac does – fertile from just eight months old – spend the vast majority of their
“This small deer can be big trouble. As seasonal breeders, their mating activity is not confined to an annual rut”
lives pregnant, adding to their family at regular seven-monthly intervals. Populations thus have the potential to increase at an alarming rate if unchecked and although small in stature, in significant densities
they are capable of doing quite extraordinary damage.
Biodiversity suffers as the deer graze on the understorey, removing plant species and reducing habitat for smaller mammals and nesting birds. Newly-planted forestry can be decimated in short order as the tenderest, tastiest tips on the juvenile trees are grazed and, as reported recently in these pages by Richard Negus, the success of ambitious tree-planting schemes is likely to be severely affected by the damage that these deer can do.
Gamekeepers are also rarely pleased to see muntjac in the neighbourhood; not only can they pilfer a great amount from game feeders, they are notorious for ruining game drives, as panicked deer suddenly burst from cover and put everything into the air at once, usually accompanied by a volley of blue language from the keeper.
Muntjac are also sadly very often found contributing to road traffic accidents in areas of high population density; their penchant for grazing at dusk on roadside verges, twinned with their small size, means they are quite often not seen until it’s too late.
Compounding these issues is the fact that ‘munties’ can be tough to control. Fencing out a species with young little bigger than a hare is prohibitively expensive and muntjac are well known for being an elusive stalking target. The best time for culling is when the cover is lowest, but during the winter the last thing many shoots want is an aggressive deer management programme underway.
The full range of issues posed by a growing wild muntjac population are well rehearsed in England and it is clear they are not good news. So, how worried should we be in Ireland?
Muntjac in Ireland
The first confirmed ‘wild’ muntjac in the Republic of Ireland was shot at Avoca, County Wicklow, in 2007. This was almost certainly an escapee from a private collection, a small number of which existed both here and in Northern Ireland. In response to this, the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) added muntjac to the Deer Hunting Licence and the yearly cull return form, declaring a 12-month season on the species.
Between 2008 and 2015, a total of 82 animals were reported shot by stalkers
across 12 counties in the Republic. Almost none of these incidences were accompanied by photographic evidence, leading some to posit that some of these could be misidentifications or fabrications, but it seems highly unlikely that ignorance or dishonesty could account for them all.
Professor Jaimie Dick, an expert on invasive species at Queen’s University in Belfast and himself a keen stalker, is convinced that muntjac are more widespread on the island than is commonly supposed and has a library of footage from trail cameras in a number of locations in County Down and County Armagh.
“At this stage, asking how many muntjac there are is the wrong question,” says Professor Dick. “We’ll likely never know that. We need to determine whether or not they are present and breeding in the wild.”
To this end, he undertook genetic testing on two muntjac bucks culled in the same location. The results proved they were not full brothers, sharing only one common parent, suggesting the presence of at least five muntjac in the wild in that area prior to their demise. Later, he shot a fawn and a pregnant doe, adding further weight to the theory that they are breeding in the wild. As a chilling aside, a new disease – a novel gammaherpesvirus related to Malignant Catarrhal Fever – was identified in these muntjac, a report on which was later published in The Archives of Virology.
The great escape
It’s safe to assume that a muntjac never swam the Irish Sea, and they owe their presence here to escape or release from private collections or by stalking syndicates. Indeed, such human assistance is believed to have been the key factor in the large increase in the muntjac population in England from the 1970s onwards.
It’s not currently against the law to own a muntjac in Ireland; when they made their debut on the EU’S Invasive Alien Species list in 2016, it became illegal only to buy or sell live animals. Prior to this, a breeding pair could, I am told, be purchased for around £750 should you have the inclination and a few well-fenced acres.
Private collectors were permitted to keep the animals until the end of their natural life provided that reproduction and escape were prevented, but they could not profit from their sale. Professor Dick explains that, faced with the ongoing cost of keeping animals they couldn’t sell, some shady wildlife dealers simply released them. This is widely believed to be the source of a number of sightings of muntjac deer in 2016, at least one of which was filmed in the Stranorlar area of County Donegal.
Missed chance
It seems beyond doubt that there are muntjac living in the wild somewhere in Ireland today. In the North, there also appears to be good evidence that in some areas at least the deer are breeding successfully, indicating that we have already missed the chance to prevent this invasive species from making the jump into the wild.
“It seems beyond doubt that muntjac are living in the wild in Ireland today”
That said, the paucity of sightings across the rest of the island would certainly suggest that they are not yet present across a wide area nor in significant numbers. Almost all properly confirmed sightings have subsequently been traced to escapes from private collections and these are dwindling since the introduction of the EU Invasive Alien Species list in 2016.
Reassuring though this might be given the potential impact they can have on forestry and biodiversity, and the well-known difficulties inherent in controlling muntjac populations, it’s clear that this is an issue that needs to be taken seriously, and the coming years may prove crucial in determining the fate of the Irish muntjac.