By David Bocking
An encounter with a red deer is not something you’ll forget. Right now, the older stags have metre-wide antlers and an imperious: ‘Yes, who are you?’ attitude that will stop you in your tracks if you cross their path one misty morning. But they’ll have seen you coming.
Deer are at home in the trees, and can watch you from forests like Lady Canning’s without you ever knowing they’re there. But catch their eye and you’ll tingle with all the associations of the hunter and hunted, infused by dim memories of the old horned gods of the ancients. There’s also the simple fact that this is a very big animal with very sharp antlers that can run a lot faster than you.
It’s autumn, the season of the red deer rut, when our largest land animals get together to roar and battle each other.
If you’re used to the epic hunting and shooting inspired paintings of rampant regal stags by Landseer and others, you might imagine that the red deer rut is all about huge male deer savagely fighting each other to round up harems of meek females (or hinds).
In fact, says longtime deerwatcher Danny Udall, from the Eastern Moors Partnership, deer society is much more of a matriarchy. The hinds select a safe territory that suits them for bringing up their young (fawns), maybe in a small social group. The stags then arrive at the time of the rut to compete for their attention.
And the males are not that keen to hurt each other. Danny describes their engagement as a “tussle.” It’s more a trial of strength than a fight to the death, he explains, with some roaring and occasionally locking horns for a bit of pushing and shoving. But quite often the stags will just back off after sizing each other up without any aggro at all.
Some stags do get injured or even killed, but it’s not as common as you’d think. Stags have to stay alert and awake throughout the weeks of the rut, often losing weight. In harsh winters they can die from exhaustion in later months.
You may have seen the rut on Autumnwatch, usually shot in wild landscapes like Scotland or Dartmoor. But you don’t need to travel that far: since the 1980s herds of red deer have been growing and spreading on the steel city’s borders. You could head out from Sheffield today on the 218 bus and watch a landscape of red deer roaring across the moors for their mating rituals, like chunky antelope on a cold English Serengeti.
“We’re still lucky to enjoy seeing red deer in the UK, we didn’t make them extinct here like we did with a lot of other species,” says Danny. “Seeing a red deer in the wild is one of those moments that many people will cherish for the rest of their life.”
Danny is steeped in deer lore. I’ve tramped over our wilding moors with him throughout the seasons, learning about the changing fortunes of the big beasts on the edge of Sheffield, and how they and the landscape they now live in are intertwined.
So, time to get your rain cape, your telescope and your deerstalker hat. Let’s head out to Big Moor.
Red Deer Redemption
Take the tourist bus from Sheffield to the daytripper’s hotspots of Bakewell or Chatsworth, and the first bit of Peak District you encounter after leaving the city at Owler Bar is Big Moor. Stretching away to the western horizon is around 10 square kilometres of high inhospitable moorland, which in previous incarnations was used for sheep rearing, grouse shooting, metalworking and storing drinking water for the nearby city.
It’s now managed as part of the Eastern Moors Partnership by staff working for the conservation charities RSPB and the National Trust, who want a place where nature can recover and thrive, and where locals can come and watch the wildness on Sheffield’s doorstep.
Professor Ian Rotherham has been keeping an eye on our deer for years. When he was starting work as a local ecologist, red deer were a local rarity, he tells me. Then sometime in the 1980s a small herd escaped from Chatsworth, climbed up the hill to Big Moor and found a new home on a wide expanse of damp and empty moorland.
Ian tells me they were joined by another small herd released by a wealthy landowner in Totley, and remote and unbothered by humans and their dogs, the herd grew to the 170 or more animals we’re likely to see at the rut this autumn.
I came across a prescient volume Ian put together after a conference in the 1990s, where experts from across the country asked how the expansion of deer (in Sheffield and elsewhere) might affect the nationwide plans for urban tree planting at that time.
Deer of all kinds eat a lot of foliage as they go about their lives, and they particularly like succulent young trees and branches. Red deer and roe deer are native to the UK, and in the past co-existed with trees and woods, because predators like wolves would prey on deer, and more importantly move them around the countryside.
If a herd of deer found some nice young trees, they might stick around for a few days until the local wolf pack found them and ate one of the older herd members, prompting the remaining deer to scarper to another patch of trees with fewer wolves about - for now. And so on. A herd of deer could rarely stick around long enough to completely wipe out a tasty patch of young woodland.
The challenge for conservationists like Danny and the Eastern Moors Partnership is how to deal with a growing herd of large hungry herbivores, unworried by predators, on a piece of land you’ve earmarked for nature recovery, where you want to see a wide and healthy range of flora and fauna.
Pollen records from the deep peat show that the moorland around Big Moor hosted a wide range of plants in the past, and Danny tells me the plan for the Eastern Moors is to have a mosaic of habitats adding up to around a third damp bogland, a third open bushy moors and a third woodland. This, he and his colleagues think, will provide a ‘sweet spot’ for biodiversity, with a large and growing mix of interconnected species supporting each other.
Some animals or plants might thrive at the expense of others for a while, but a wide mix of species, and crucially species that can expand in and out of the area to ensure genetic diversity too, should provide a measure of checking and balancing.
So, where is the check and balance to an ever expanding population of red deer eating most of the young trees and bushes you want to see growing into species-rich woodland?
The answer over the last few years has been to cull red deer as they reach a number too high for the landscape to support, or where they’re overeating a particular area. There was a time the land managers kept quiet about this, but Danny and colleagues now believe the public understand the reasoning.
In a wooded landscape, you’d expect to find around four deer per square kilometre, he explains. If you have 20 deer per square kilometre, as is sometimes the case on Big Moor, the landscape will not be wooded, and the deer may struggle for food and eventually become diseased and unhealthy.
So every winter, after Danny’s team have counted deer by a thermal drone camera, a decision is made about where (or if) to send a contractor with a rifle to “play the role of wolf in the landscape” as Danny puts it. The shooter targets hinds (females) rather than the sporting deerstalker’s choice of multi-pronged stags, since the aim is to control numbers as well as keep the herds moving.
In 2004, 54 red deer were counted on Big Moor, Danny tells me, and modelling showed that left to their own devices, those few dozen deer might now be a herd of a few thousand, rather than the current 200 or less.
Not all landowners have made the same choices. There are the remains of a released herd of red deer around Wharncliffe and Ewden, they turn up in Ecclesall Woods sometimes, and one even found its way down the river Don to Kelham Island.
The Big Moor herd have spread out onto other local moors, and into the Sheffield woodlands at Lady Canning’s, where a small group have set up their home, despite the large numbers of dogs and dog walkers.
You’re advised to keep dogs away from deer, especially during the rut, where a large stag may not know the difference between your cockapoodle and a wolf. (If a deer does charge, the advice is to let go of your dog’s lead, as it may then be able to get away.)
The shot deer from Big Moor are sold on as venison, Danny says, adding that anyone who’d like to support the scheme can get in touch with the Eastern Moors Partnership for local suppliers.
If a decision is made to create a wooded landscape, this kind of action is inevitable if deer are around, says Ian Rotherham. “But there are still people who are a bit squeamish when it comes to shooting Bambi’s mother.”
Roe Deer Returns
Red deer on the fringes of a post-industrial city is one story, but there’s another member of the deer family moving in among us; this time even more urban, and even more surprising.
“Roe deer are small and elusive, a dawn and dusk sort of thing, and they seem to be quietly increasing,” says Val Clinging, a mammal recorder for Sorby Natural History Society. “And they can turn up just about anywhere.”
And she means anywhere. Not just any patch of green space or park or woodland, or any garden. They’re on our riverbanks, the sides of railways, and roe deer even find the bushes alongside many of our dual carriageways a perfect wildlife corridor, hidden from busy humans yards away.
A little taller than a greyhound, it’s easy to see why city folk are confused by roe deer. This was the species spotted on inner city streets during the Covid lockdown, taking advantage of the quiet spaces to find new territories.
Roe deer are not herd animals, so you generally find them in small family groups of three or four deer or less, that is if you find them at all. “They’re small and quiet, the sort of animal where you look and it’s there, and then turn, and look back and it isn’t there any more,” says Val.
Roe deer were rare too thirty years ago, but their numbers are also increasing, she says, not just here but across the UK. They are generalists, and will eat garden plants like roses as well as woodland flowers, mushrooms and tree shoots. Opportunistic animals seem to be doing well in our changing climate.
She and Ian add that another deer seems now to be arriving in Sheffield: the muntjac, an introduced species originally from China. Muntjacs bark like a dog, and are smaller than a labrador. The male also has little tusks, which may be a surprise when one turns up in your local woodland.
Val says the best time to seek out urban deer is dawn or dusk, and adds that roe deer seem to like small and untidy patches of green in a city, which is good reason to make sure that Sheffield communities retain those small green spaces, she says.
“We’re lucky to have such mixed habitats within the city,” she says. “Deer take advantage of those places as much as local people.”
No one seems sure exactly why deer are moving into our city. Maybe simply because they have the opportunity, the food and the space, and few perils. I’m told there are still deer poachers around, but is there much taste for venison these days? And they do get hit by cars on city roads, dangerous for drivers as well as deer. Take note of the warning signs - they’re positioned at known deer crossing points, after all.
But in a city like ours, the return of one of our big wild beasts is surely welcome. Just once, on a silent morning in the Limb Valley, I’ll never forget a brown roe deer looking up at me, cracking a single twig and vanishing.
And if you can, head out to look out over Big Moor from White Edge just above Curbar, to see the red deer rut in October or early November. Take some binoculars, be patient and listen for the roaring of the stags, and pick out one, then two, and when you get accustomed to the shape and the camouflage, you’ll see dozens.
Or if you’re lucky like I was one golden afternoon, you might have an Attenborough moment, and catch a small herd racing up and over the edge, close enough to hear the stones rattle, then prancing away across the heather to the next patch of trees, without a care, as if there never was a wolf in the landscape.
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