Red deer – From Pyrenees to Pennines

This wasn’t the post I intended to make. But an accident turned into an opportunity..

Yesterday morning saw me with a friend, completing our tour of duty as volunteer Roaming Rangers in the Deer Park at Studley Royal. This involves doing a low-key census of the deer, looking out for noteworthy wildlife, answering questions from the public, and occasionally asking dog-owners to put their pets on a short lead, especially now, when female deer are busy giving birth. And I took my camera. Accidentally, I left it on black and white setting. But I find I don’t mind. I’ll share some of my images with you.

The featured photo shows the first scene we saw: red deer stags all sitting resting beneath the trees. This is their languid time of year, when they eat and rest, building up their strength for the autumn rut.

And here’s a stag; a young calf; and a hind with her calf.

We’re just about to change terminology, because we’re leaving red deer behind, and joining the fallow deer. The male is a buck, the female is a doe, and the youngster a fawn.

As we spotted fallow deer ahead of us, we all but walked into the youngest of young fawns, left sleeping by its mum far too near an – admittedly little-used – path. I snatched this photo, but we hurried away, not wanting to cause distress to the little creature’s mother.

Then we had a wonderful twenty minutes or so, staring across a deep dry valley much loved by the deer because of its relative inaccessibility, and watching a young fawn gambolling through the long grass, dashing back from time to time to see its mum.

And here are two typical does: one looks ‘normal’, but the white one is too. She’s not albino, but leucistic: she has reduced pigentation in her coat: it’s a pretty common variation – as is melanistic, where the opposite is true, and over-production of melanin leads to a black coat.