Frankly deer, I don’t give a damn

WORK found me in Co Wicklow for a couple of days recently and I was surprised by the number of deer I saw.

The weather was cold and frosty at the time and I think this pushed the animals down from the higher ground, some of which was snow covered, into the more sheltered valley floors.

Many of them looked like red deer but when I checked it out, I found this was unlikely. It’s believed that all, or practically all, the deer in Wicklow are either sikas or red/sika hybrids.

Native red deer became extinct everywhere in Ireland except for the Killarney area in the relatively recent past. They survived in Donegal until the 1860s and in west Mayo probably up to the 1930s.

I can’t find a precise extinction date for Wicklow but it looks like it was fairly early in the 19th century. There was great pressure on wildlife, particularly edible wildlife, before and during the Great Famine.

Some experts have suggested that the Killarney herd is not truly native but is descended from domestic animals brought in by Neolithic farmers over 5,000 years ago. But recent genetic testing of the Killarney animals makes it seem more likely that they are true native animals that have been in the country longer than human beings.

Anyway, in the 1850s Lord Powerscourt decided he would reintroduce red deer on his huge Wicklow estates and brought in animals from Britain. In Lord Powerscourt’s mind at least, Britain and Ireland were the same country at the time, so he really had no concept that he was introducing foreign stock.

Unfortunately in 1860 he decided to add an exotic species to the collection in his deer park. This was the sika deer, a distant and diminutive relative of the red deer from the Japanese archipelago.

At the time, nobody knew that the two species could interbreed and that the resulting hybrids would be fertile. But they could and they did, and they escaped. The descendents of this miscegenetic form the deer herd in Wicklow and the fringes of the surrounding counties, and these are the animals I was watching the other day.

It’s recorded that Lord Powerscourt also sent sika deer to other deer parks in the country, including the Muckross estate, which is now the Killarney National Park. There’s quite a large herd of sikas in the park today but for some rather inexplicable reason, this seems to be the only place in the country where the two species are reluctant to interbreed.

There aren’t any good census figures for deer numbers in Ireland at present. But 15,000 animals, is a fairly accurate estimate of the herd centred on the Wicklow uplands, which is quite a lot.

They do some damage to forestry and inhibit the natural regeneration of wild trees. They’re also unpopular with farmers because they compete with livestock for grazing, although deer really prefer to browse woody vegetation rather than to graze grass.

As Lord Powerscourt discovered, they are excellent high-jumpers which makes fencing them in or fencing them out a difficult and expensive business. So over 1,000 animals are legally shot each year in Wicklow and probably several hundred are illegally shot.

Despite this, their numbers are increasing. The odd one may be killed by dogs, but really their only predator is man. The same problem occurs in other countries, which is why serious consideration is being given to the reintroduction of wolves in Scotland.

In Scotland the deer are predominantly reds, and people pay to shoot some animals.

But sikas and hybrids are smaller, have rather insignificant antlers and don’t even provide the best venison. Lord Powerscourt has a lot to answer for.

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