Hunting and Stalking the Deer: the Pursuit of Red, Fallow, and Roe Deer in England and Scotland

Abstract

WHILE the sumptuous volume on deerstalking and stag-hunting whereof Mr. Lionel Edwards and Mr. Frank Wallace are joint authors forms a notable addition to the literature of field sports, for the field naturalist it has a strain of melancholy, inasmuch as it records marked degeneration in the noblest of our native land fauna-Cervus elaphus. “It is curious,” observed Mr. Walter Winans in his recent work, “Deerbreeding for Fine Heads” (London, 1913), “that Scottish stags are at the present time the worst in Europe.” It would be curious, indeed, if they were not so, having regard to the conditions of climate and food supply which they have to encounter in winter. By nature and original habit the red deer is a woodland animal, only resorting to the hilltops in summer heat to escape the torment of flies and to browse on the flush of upland grass, but ever returning to the woods for shelter and food in winter. Now that man has felled the forest and claimed all the low ground for his industry and crowded habitation, the red deer are confined throughout the year to storm-swept wastes at high altitudes. The term ‘deer forest’ remains only to connote some of the bleakest and most treeless tracts in North Britain. The real wonder is that British red deer have not deteriorated still further from the magnificent creatures that roamed the Caledonian forest of yore, whereof the bones and antlers exhumed from peat-mosses and tidal estuaries prove to have been no whit inferior to animals of the same species now inhabiting the Carpathians, the Caucasus, and certain wellwooded English parks. Hunting and Stalking the Deer: the Pursuit of Red, Fallow, and Roe Deer in England and Scotland. ByLionel Edwards Harold Frank Wallace. Pp. xi + 274 + 48 plates. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1927.) 63s. net.