Return of the native

COVID-19 is merely the latest link in a long historical chain of human events that have impacted on Britain’s deer, says Graham Downing

The buck stood on the ride as bold as brass, looking straight at me for perhaps half a minute. No more than a youngster, he was moulting his winter coat and the chestnut red of his summer pelage was just starting to appear through the gaps in what looked like a grey, moth-eaten army blanket. Then, with a flick of his antlers, he trotted off, taking with him the young doe that I had spotted further back in the wood.

Two months ago, there was nothing on the farm but Chinese water deer and a small, elusive group of red hinds. I would catch glimpses of them when I took the dogs out for their morning walk or see evidence of their night-time excursions by way of slot marks in the wet ground or images on one of my two trail cams.

But now the reds and the Chinese seem to have left us, to be replaced by roe and the occasional muntjac. We shot one roebuck at the beginning of April, a decent-sized animal but with malformed and misshapen antlers that had clearly been damaged in velvet, a good cull buck. However, there are not that many roe around us and I am content to leave in peace those showing themselves, at least until the rut is over. Then, perhaps, I might review my shooting policy.

Why the change in deer activity? Is it because of the significant reduction in human traffic in the countryside since the coronavirus lockdown? Or is it simply because the spring growth of the arable crops around us has changed the pattern of cover and feeding potential?

Other stalkers I have spoken to also feel that deer have been more visible since stalking was brought to an abrupt and early closure in the third week of March. And it is not only stalkers who are seeing more deer in the countryside at present: a photograph of a group of red hinds was Whatsapped the other morning by the delighted owner of a garden close to where I live in Suffolk.

I suspect that there have been many more similar encounters. Perhaps it is unsurprising that a prey species should become emboldened the moment it knows that it is no longer being hunted. How often do we remark upon the way in which cock pheasants strut brazenly around our gardens within days of the end of the game season?

“Are we seeing more deer because of the significant reduction in human traffic?”

Foot-and-mouth

There was plenty of anecdotal evidence during and after the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak — which closed down both deer stalking and public access to the countryside for many months — that deer were much more visible in places where they were not normally seen. Indeed, subsequent deer population surveys suggested significant increases in range and population.

But if deer respond to changes in human activity, they respond far more to environmental changes, most of which are human-induced. A spectacular example of this is East Anglia’s roe population. It is clear that centuries of increased hunting pressure and habitat loss — through the conversion of forest to farmland

— led to severe declines in roe across England. By the 16th century the species was reportedly absent from most of the Midlands and the southern counties. The return of the roe in southern Britain, in the 19th century, was the result of introductions.

Clinging on

The one that most intrigues me was the translocation of 12 roe from Wurttemberg in Germany to Croxton Park near Thetford in 1884 by William Dalziel Mackenzie. Perhaps they were for sport, or perhaps because the Mackenzie family simply enjoyed seeing roe about. Either way, a small population clung on in the local area, just about surviving in game coverts and plantations on sporting estates.

Their fortunes, however, changed in the 1920s in the most dramatic fashion. World War I had seen a near-disastrous national shortage of timber that led in 1919 to the birth of the Forestry Commission. Meanwhile, post-war agricultural depression resulted in local estates such as Santon Downham coming on to the market. The land was bought by the Commission and planted to create Thetford Forest, the largest area of woodland in East Anglia and an absolute haven for those German roe deer.

In 1971, my father and a group of his friends took, for the princely sum of £50, an annual Forestry Commission lease on 1,003 acres of the West Tofts shoot, just north of Thetford, and I remember that we used occasionally to see roe there when we walked-up the forest blocks for pheasants. There were yet more changes to the East Anglian countryside in the 1990s with the rapid expansion of government-funded agri-environment schemes, which led to the widespread planting of new trees and cover crops. The eastward expansion of the roe range out of Thetford Forest was assured and they reached my part of east Suffolk about 20 years ago.

Harmful invaders?

When deer biologist Karis Baker published her work on the genetics of British roe in 2014, she confirmed that the Norfolk population was genetically distinct from the remainder of the country’s roe, having derived from those 12 German deer. It amuses me, when told that muntjac are harmful because they are foreign invaders, whereas roe are benign because they are a native species, to point out that our local roe, genetically speaking, are equally as foreign.

The same might, to some extent, be said of our local red deer which, like the roe, were exterminated from these parts during the Middle Ages. Their presence here today is a result of the activities of the Norwich

Staghounds, which flourished in the first half of the 20th century hunting the carted deer. The deer were kept in a deer park and, on hunting days, boxed up and released near to the meet of hounds.

At the end of the hunt, they would be recaptured and returned to the park. Except occasionally, a deer was not recaptured and became an ‘outlier’. Eventually, there were sufficient outliers to form small breeding herds. It is their descendants that may be encountered in places as far apart as the Euston and Elveden estates in the Breckland to Dunwich and Minsmere on the Suffolk coast.

My guess is that those hinds that were hanging about the farm during March and early April also owe their lineage to the deer left behind by the old Norwich Staghounds. It would be interesting to examine their genetic history. If you did so, I doubt you would detect many signs of the ancient native red deer stock that once sheltered under the primeval forests of Merrie England. I suspect that they would display a much more mixed heritage than that, and perhaps one day genetic science may give us an answer.

Croxton Park, Cambridgeshire, where 12 roe deer were introduced from Germany in 1884

The Staghounds inadvertently red