A Study of the Relations Between Roe, Red and Fallow Deer, with Special Reference to Drummond Hill Forest, Scotland

Abstract

Correspondence has appeared in the literature concerning the relationships between red deer (Cervus elaphus), roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), fallow deer (Dama dama) and some other species, such as Japanese deer (Cervus nippon), which are feral in the British Isles. Competition, described as antipathy or antagonism by various writers, appears to be the most widely accepted mechanism whereby relative abundance of one deer species is often correlated with relative scarcity of others. Other explanations involve geographical limits of distribution, two examples being the relative abundance of fallow deer in the south of England, and of roe deer in the Lake District (Delap 1955, Carne 1955). Carne (1954) has stated that Japanese (syn. sika) and fallow deer are, having been introduced into Britain, a powerful deterrent to the roe; he claims support for this contention from historical records which he considers show that as fallow deer have increased in an area, roe deer have decreased, often to extinction. Having observed in the Lake District of England that fallow deer have never established themselves in forests occupied by roe deer, Carne confirmed (1955) a statement by Delap (1955) that there is antipathy between them. Delap also stated that roe deer and red deer or red deer and fallow deer can 'associate happily', but that antagonism exists between roe deer and fallow deer. However, even co-existence of red deer and roe deer does not appear to be a constant feature; Wildash (1951) records that roe deer are seldom found where red deer are present in any numbers in Austria, that the red deer is a 'natural enemy' of the roe, and also that Austrian foresters could not give any reason for this antipathy. The purpose of this paper is to examine these ideas in the light of further evidence. It will be shown that roe, red and fallow deer are characteristically most numerous at different stages in the development of several British forests; when two or more of these three species are present in the same forest area, the number of each of them increases and decreases in a successional manner, which is related to development of the forest habitat towards a climax of mature trees. Such successional changes of the deer fauna are considered to be similar in nature to the marked changes which were shown to occur to the species composition of the bird fauna when a heathland area in East Anglia was afforested (Lack & Lack 1951).