Seldom seen, but all around

If I sit still enough, and downwind, the muntjacs will go about their business quite happily. A whiff of human stink, and they are on the alert. Any more, and they bark. Movement and first they freeze then flee, some in big bounds with their tail raised like a white flag of surrender, others in the slow, stochastic walk that seems specific to their kind.

They can have pretty faces, but their low front end gives them a hunched over clumsy appearance, though they are far from clumsy.

Often they are in pairs: two females or occasionally two males. Sometimes a male will follow a female at a distance. On one day, three were walking together. I thought a female and a yearling, with a male in pursuit. It's hard to tell from a distance.

I have found their skulls and bones a few times, and one incredibly stinky corpse. Mischa said she saw one with an almost healed but still sore gash - she guessed from a fight or perhaps barbed wire.

In the woodland near Kairos, there are various quadrats with parts that have been protected from deer. In those areas, there is so much vegetation! One houses a huge furze bush, others have young hawthorns and one has a cherry tree. How different this place would be without all those hungry mouths, eating up every shoot except the nettles, brambles and occasional foxgloves.

Deer control, I hear, may be enforced.

I feel sorry for the muntjacs. Now, many people just see them as deer and so like them, others like them because they are kind of cute and you don't see many mammals in the English countryside, what with them being extinct or nocturnal. Even the dawn and dusk feeders, like rabbits and hares, are an increasingly rare sight. But "conservationists" regard them as an invasive species and, besides, there are too many deer of all stripes. They have a point. And given the fragmented habitats - not to mention politics, the farming community, and idiots - wolves are not an option.

I don't feel happy about the choice: dying woodland or killing deer. But that is the choice. There is an insect apocalypse - and as well as the chemicals that's due to the lack of appropriate habitat. The lack of insects, coming from the lack of flora, means a lack of everything else. Except deer.

Some say, well, maybe now is the age of deer, and grey squirrels, and corvids. Fair enough... but, well, is it? And what about when the deer don't have enough to eat? And starve or get run over in larger numbers?

I have no answer.