Hunting and Shooting Wildlife link to GOV.UK

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Deer creating damage and delight!

A century ago, deer were relatively few and far between. Now our countries’ five species have undergone such dramatic population explosions that they cause millions of pounds’ worth of crop damage and create serious headaches for many rural locations. That is not to say an encounter with any the deer species can’t be a delight. It often is, and with relatively low deer mortality rates, an abundance of food and no natural deer predators prowling our modern, often less-than-wild, landscapes, such encounters are perhaps easier to experience today than ever before.
The potential for deer-versus-land-management conflict is clear which can be quite a dilemma, Maral's interests are dedicated to ensuring the delivery of a sustainable, well-managed deer population.

Annual losses attributable to damage caused by deer are estimated to be in their thousands it is not getting any better because deer populations have expanded, but now there is much greater awareness of the true impact of deer and the true nature of how we can control deer.
 

Individual fallow deer could eat 5kg. Crops were browsed and flattened – it is reported that one farmer had lost £100,000 in a year due to such damage. In addition, woodland browsing could have serious impacts on bird populations and floristic diversity. If we cannot control deer populations we will have to do more and more fencing, and fencing disrupts the wildlife even further within the fenced area so fencing is not the answer.

Well-crafted deer management plans that met the land management objectives of an area, either agricultural, commercial woodland or areas such as nature reserves and Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) were vital but should not “just be left to sit on the shelf and gather dust.” Deer management should be a “continual process” with population monitoring, trends being identified and action being evaluated, he said. Culls of up to 35% or 40% of a population may be needed just to keep numbers static.

Deer are part of our natural environment and they are here to stay, We need to learn to live with them, ensuring we manage deer populations in balance with the land management objectives of an area.We can win. We can reduce the negative impacts of deer on the level of neutral impacts and get SSSIs, for example, into favourable condition. It's often said that getting people to work together on this is the difficult part. It’s not the deer, it’s getting people to talk to each other and work with each other and then we can get what people want out of their environment.

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General information of the five UK Deer types - please click on the images above for a more informative view

Red deer - Formerly native to Britain but probably hunted to extinction in England by the Middle Ages/Tudor period. More recent protected deer park populations were likely to have been supplemented by introduced stock, but by the 1930s naturalist, A population established in Thetford Forest for hunting led to more recent dispersal. The east Suffolk population also probably stems from introductions due to hunting and escapees from deer parks.

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Fallow deer - A native species that became extinct in Britain during the last glaciation, fallow deer were reintroduced by the Normans in the 11th Century when they were released for hunting purposes. The main populations are in the vicinity of former deer parks. There has been a gradual range expansion but they have now been ousted from their former position as the most widespread deer by roe and muntjac.

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Roe deer - A native species that became extinct in much of Britain by the 18th Century, modern populations probably derive from introductions. Now it is the most widely distributed deer, although individuals did not appear in the east of the county until the early 1980s.

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Muntjac - Chinese and Indian muntjac were released in Britain in 1901 but the latter is thought to have died out. Further releases of the Chinese species followed in the 1930s and 1940s. Subsequent releases and escapes have aided its current widespread distribution, with momentum gathering from the 1970s onwards, and it is now the second-most widely distributed deer.

 

Chinese water deer - The least numerous and widespread deer, The species was introduced into Britain at Woburn Park, Bedfordshire, in 1896, with other releases or escapes taking place elsewhere.