We see three species of deer on the farm: muntjac, roe and fallow. Most of the time they keep well out of sight, but in the evenings we can often hear the distinctive bark of a muntjac echoing across the fields. Out riding or walking, one will occasionally dart out of the undergrowth with no warning at all, which makes for quite a commotion on both sides.
Out walking recently, I found an antler lying beside one of the water troughs. At first glance I took it for a fallen stick from the tree overhanging the trough, but getting closer it was obviously something else entirely: a shed antler from a fallow deer. It's easy to picture him stopping for a drink, then rubbing against the trough as he went. It's a strange thing to get your head around, that they grow and shed a full set of these every single year.
Other signs of deer on the farm are rather less welcome. We'd noticed that some of the trees we planted a few years ago were suffering significant damage, without being sure exactly what was responsible: deer, squirrels, or something else entirely. So we set up a wildlife camera on the fence directly beside one of the affected trees. We didn't have to wait long for the culprit to identify himself.
Caught on camera: a fallow buck chewing bark and scent-marking one of our young trees.
Not only is he giving the tree a thorough chewing, he's also scent-marking, rubbing his face over the trunk as he goes. The damage to this particular tree is extensive enough that we're honestly not sure it will survive; we probably won't know for certain until it's due to come into leaf next spring.
We're close to two extensive ancient woodlands, Wyre Forest and Mortimer Forest, over the other side of Ludlow, and judging by the colouring in the footage our local mammal expert thought this particular buck had most likely wandered over from Mortimer. Either way, we've since put additional guards around our young trees to give them a fighting chance.
As it turns out, our trees have got off lightly compared to some. We were recently at a wildflower meadow event organised by the Marches Meadow Group, at a site near Clun that had done a lot of tree planting of its own. Trees put in as long as ten years ago were still cropped hard by deer: a neat browsed line with just a stub of twigs poking out above each protective tube. With no natural predators left to keep numbers in check, the deer population here as elsewhere in the country has grown enormously.