Deer in the Garden

It was as though a brushful of red-brown paint had been
dropped on the grass. Then, as it moved in the winter sunlight its shape
resolved, and it leapt away, kicking out small black hooves as it ran. Further
up the garden it stopped and had a good look round. I was still paused in the
act of opening the curtain, surprised and delighted.

The muntjac nosed at the hedge and trotted to and fro on the
grass. Then, on a sudden decision, it ducked into a passage under the conifers
used by cats and vanished.

This wasn’t the first time a deer had come into our garden.
During the most recent floods in south Oxford I had a similar moment of
excitement. A muntjac was eating the ivy on our patio, the only part of the
garden not submerged in murky water and its debris. I watched it for some
minutes. Its mouth was delicate, fastidious with the leaves. Its hooves were
bright with wet, and its fur matted and filthy. Like the more recent visitor,
it was barely bigger than a cat. But when eventually it had had enough of the
ivy and threw itself into the water to swim away, the waves of its wake slopped
backwards and forwards for even longer than it took for my grin to fade.

That deer must have scrabbled over one of the fences to get
in, but the later one had an easier entry. Last winter a badger tunnelled under
one of our fences and spent an enjoyable night digging up all the bulbs and
beetles it could find. My daughter and I spent an equally enjoyable time
following its tracks around the garden and finding its thick, rough hairs
snagged on bushes and brambles. A muntjac can easily follow where a badger has
dug.

I often see badgers and deer in the fields alongside
Abingdon Road, usually late at night. There’s enough scrub land between road
and river to sustain a steady population, and the constant presence of people,
buses and cars, mean the animals are not as timid as they might be. They take
advantage of the streetlights to find their food and keep an eye out for predators.
It’s a thrill to be watching a badger root among last years’ leaves for minutes
at a time. My feelings on seeing a pair of muntjac are less ecstatic, but more
affectionate – they are such small, quivery animals.

Deer are an ambivalent success in the British countryside.
With no real predators left, the numbers of all resident deer species have
risen to higher levels than perhaps for thousands of years. Like other remaining
large mammals, they have seeped into cities. In a previous house by the
Oxford-Paddington railway line I sometimes watched a family of roe deer resting
among the trees between the line and my window.

But too many deer can damage large numbers of trees,
affecting the habitat of other species. I have heard muntjac, as a recent
addition to the UK fauna – originally from Asia they escaped from ornamental
gardens in the twentieth century – described as “pests” and “vandals”. But in a
suburban context, where all remaining green space is sculpted, the question of
what is an “invasive” species seems to me to lose any of the value it may have
in a more sensitive environment.

The afternoon following the most recent muntjac visit, my
daughter and I went out into the garden to see what traces it had left. Plenty,
as it turned out. The deer had made its distinctive tracks across the flower
patches, and in the soft earth under the grass. These were sharp and clear-cut,
jabbed into the soil and drawn out again in the same direction, so that round
the sides and front the earth is ruckled and raised. All these miniature
earthworks, each no longer than my thumb, ran in determined lines, as though
the deer had never had a second thought about where it was going.

It had left us other gifts too. I don’t know how many people
would be pleased to find deer poo in their garden, but we were. It showed that
this wasn’t the first time our visitor had come. Unlike the one-off tour by the
badger, this might be the sign of a new regular, like the fox and sparrowhawk.
Now every morning the curtains open onto the view of an imagined, hoped-for
deer bright on the grass.