The challenge for landowners and conservationists is to create the right balance between deer and other wildlife. “It’s good land management to control deer because there are no bears, wolves or cougars to do it for you,” says Hugh Rose, Scottish secretary of the British Deer Society. “As a rule of thumb a third of the population should be shot each year, which is the natural increment.

“The British Deer Society is a humane animal welfare organisation so it may sound a bit odd that we are advocating that deer should be killed. I hear people say, ‘This is a nature reserve and we don’t like killing things’. I say, ‘You won’t have a nature reserve much longer if you don’t get the deer managed’.”

Others disagree. The League Against Cruel Sports, which has wild animal sanctuaries throughout the West Country, is opposed to culling as a means of controlling deer densities. “Like any wild population our deer are self-managing in terms of numbers,” says a spokesman.

Interestingly, wildlife conservation charities like the RSPB do not share this approach.

One product of controlled culling is wild venison, which helps to pay for the deer management. It is low in cholesterol and free range.While the bigger haunches and saddles of red and fallow deer have become popular with restaurants, the problem, says Rose, “is getting people to eat venison from the smaller roe and muntjac. They provide a neat, delicious joint which easily feeds a family.”

So, maybe we will have to eat more venison, to save our bluebell woods too.

• Information about wild venison, including recipes and suppliers, www.gametoeat.co.uk. British Deer Society 01425 655434, www.bds.org.uk
  
  

  This is a muntjacking

  IF I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it. The muntjac trotted up and down inside the wire fence I had spent a week putting up to keep it out, then ducked its horrible greedy little head and eased through the 5in mesh and vanished into the undergrowth on the other side. It left behind it the usual trail of destruction: bark nibbled off my fledgling fruit trees, leaves on my raspberry canes shredded, shoots on the climbing rose nibbled, leek tips nipped off.

  I live in the middle of a large, busy village in south Oxfordshire. There are houses all around, shops, schools, buses, pubs — it is definitely not rural Britain. It is not, should not be, deer territory. Not that the muntjac counts as deer, in my admittedly jaundiced view. The creature is a stain on a noble dynasty, more like a rat on stilts. The idea of anyone regarding them as ornamental is absurd. Yet that’s how they got here, brought over by some idiot from China, and now wrecking gardens all over southern England.

  The mesh fence was my first attempt to keep them out. After I had recovered from the incident described above I spent a fortnight putting up nylon netting against the wire. Not very clever, I admit — in a trice one of the monsters had shoved its way through, and the nibbling started up all over again.

  I have now completed fence number three, 50 metres of chain link fence, dug into the ground. It looks impregnable, but I give due warning: if this fails, I shall be forced, reluctantly, to resort to firearms. I am resolved that I will not be made a monkey of by a muntjac. If you get my drift. Tom Fort

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