NATURE: Dealing with our deer

Great pressure is being applied to our wild deer, which are quickly becoming the scapegoat for all Ireland’s environmental ills.
Nobody can deny that an overpopulation of these animals is harmful for all parties, including the deer themselves.
Farmers and other landowners whose fences are repeatedly thrown down as deer move from daytime rest to nocturnal feeding places have just reason to complain. Forestry owners find damage wrought to trees as red and sika stags and fallow bucks clean their antlers and vent their autumn rage in mock battle.
Speeding motorists complain of deer that ‘appear from nowhere’ in front of their vehicles. True, accidents do happen, but perhaps our new speed limits will help in that regard. This impending legislation, together with greater public awareness of the creatures with which we share this world, will make everyone and everything a little safer.
As for the deer themselves, why, they are turning up in small numbers in places they haven’t been seen for more than a century. While some claim this is due to the burgeoning and out-of-control population of deer, there is yet another reason why the range of these animals is expanding so rapidly, and that is the avaricious ‘cull’ or wholesale slaughter currently in progress.
Over the two-year disruption Covid delivered to the world, deer were barely troubled and the population probably increased by 40 percent or more. Once the Covid restrictions were lifted and we took to the roads again, animals that had become accustomed to having wild places pretty much to themselves were being sighted as never before.
I should add a small caveat here. As one actively searching for red deer in south and central Mayo (to watch not kill), I can vouch that far from there being too many, there are simply not enough of these Irish beasts.
When it comes to invasive sika deer, whoever set this non-native species free in Ireland in the first place ought to bear responsibility for getting rid of them again. Sika, which hail from Japan and don’t belong in the Irish landscape at all, cause a unique set of problems, including interbreeding with native Irish reds, even to the point where we are in danger of losing that unique part of our natural heritage.
Similarly, there are places where the population of fallow deer has increased to unsustainable levels. Again, there is reason to limit the numbers of these non-native animals for the health of the wild herd and to mitigate the damage that they unquestionably do.
The answers to the problems caused by these two species do not lie in charging into areas where they proliferate, brandishing enough firepower to start a small war and dispersing deer to the four corners of the country. Such action has merely spread deer over a wider area. It has also encouraged nocturnal behaviour, for these are intelligent animals that quickly learn to stay out of sight.
In 2023 some 6,486 deer hunting licenses were issued throughout the country. Between these a total of 78,125 wild deer were reported as culled. How many more were killed and unreported is anybody’s guess.
While first time applicants for deer-hunting licenses must first complete a certified training course, there is no obligation for all who hunt deer to be properly trained. Anybody who cares to look can find hunting videos on the internet that show a disconcerting range of unsafe shooting incidents.
With so many guns on the ground it can only be a matter of time before a tragedy occurs.
Nobody is denying the need for a safe and effective deer management policy, one that treats the cause rather than the effect of swelling deer numbers.
In this regard, a rather obvious partial remedy might be the reintroduction of a top predator, all of which were wiped out centuries ago. Nobody is suggesting we want bears or wolves. But what about lynx?
In mountainous, well-forested areas such as North Mayo and parts of Wicklow there is plenty of room for these deer-hunting cats. It isn’t the number of animals taken by lynx that provides the real benefit in having them present, but the fact they keep deer herds on the move and prevent them from settling in any one area long enough for numbers to build to unsustainable levels.
It is a clear fact there are too many deer, but not everywhere. Where there is legislation, it is poorly applied. As an example, even as policymakers grapple with the problem of controlling the national deer herd, we now have a spreading and damaging population of muntjac deer. Illegally introduced for hunting purposes, these newcomers might be a string to the commercial hunter’s bow, but they are another bullet to Ireland’s biodiversity.

Michael Kingdon, a naturalist and keen fisherman, lives on the shores of Mayo’s Lough Carra, the best example of a shallow marl lake in western Europe and therefore an SAC of enormous ecological and conservation importance.