How deer became ‘way ahead’ of humans – and grew out of control

An unseen menace haunts the forests of Surrey’s Hampton Estate. Signs of it are everywhere across the estate’s 1,170 acres of prized woodlands. Carpets of bramble have been neatly munched, the tips of tree saplings nibbled and trunks of more mature saplings stripped of bark. 

“They really are a pest,” whispers Paul Blunden, inspecting the damage on a coppiced chestnut which has been used as a rubbing post by a territorial buck. He shoulders his .243 rifle and scans the trees for any flicker of movement through the canopy. Squirrels scamper over the leaves and woodpeckers drum a percussion beat to the dawn chorus rising all around us. But the deer have slipped into the shadows.

There are few across Surrey with a better eye for stalking deer than Paul Blunden. The words “deer hunter” are even stamped across the nape of his dark-green fleece. The 63-year-old has worked on the Hampton Estate for nearly two decades and lives in a cottage on the grounds. Previously he worked as a gamekeeper, but now is employed as a forester and deerstalker on the front line of what has become a nationwide battle to save our woodlands.

Britain’s deer population is booming. According to government figures, there are currently estimated to be in the region of two million deer across the country (an increase from around 450,000 in the 1970s). This represents the highest level since 1,000 years ago, when forests were protected by royal decree so noblemen could merrily sling arrows at herds of deer.

Back then, at least, there were also some natural predators to help manage populations. Britain’s last wolves were hunted to extinction in the 17th century. Lynx disappeared long before that. 

Now it is just us – and the deer are running riot, munching crops and stripping trees. Just last week a video circulated online of the A15 in Lincolnshire being brought to a standstill by a huge herd of many dozens of deer gambolling over the road.

As well as proving a dangerous presence on the nation’s highways – the number of annual collisions involving deer in the UK ranges from 42,000 to 74,000 – they are also increasingly causing havoc across the countryside and devastating woodlands.

Minette Batters, the former president of the National Farmers Union, told the BBC last week that the “deer population is absolutely out of control and causing a lot of damage”. If left unchecked it is feared they will also make Britain’s net zero ambitions untenable, with an aim for expanding England’s woods to 16.5 per cent of the total land area by 2050 a key aspect of the Environment Act. 

While debate rages over the viability of introducing natural predators (something supported by many conservationists but which Batters and others remain resolutely against) the Government is developing plans to wage war on Britain’s deer.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is due to publish a long-awaited deer strategy, with plans under consideration including using the surplus venison to supply the NHS and Armed Forces, as well as prisons. Meanwhile, last year a new subsidy was introduced incentivising landowners to implement deer control and management programmes.

Back on the Hampton Estate, Paul Blunden says they are now shooting in the region of 80 deer a year compared with 25 or so previously. This year he has already killed 23. Despite the increasing workload, while the estate is implementing an impressive range of nature restoration schemes, there is little appetite here to reintroduce predators.

The deer found around Hampton are mostly roe, which along with red deer are the two native species present in Britain. Fallow, sika, water deer and muntjac are all non-native species which have been introduced over the centuries. 

Muntjac are also increasingly making incursions into Hampton and, due to their prodigious breeding ability (one female can produce three fawns every two years), Blunden is worried about their impact if left unchecked. Out in the forest he points out to me an area of land where a few years ago deer munched through 5,000 newly planted softwood trees. Worse yet they occasionally make it into the estate’s 24-acre historic hop fields, which are now the last of their kind in Surrey.

However, despite there being an estimated population of around 200 deer across the 2,250-acre estate, they are not easy to find. As we crunch as quietly as possible over the beechmast and cracking twigs, Blunden explains that despite their poor eyesight, deer have evolved an incredibly attuned sense of hearing and smell. “They are way ahead of us,” he says. “They can smell us from several hundred metres away.”

He also believes deer know when they are being stalked, tracking the stop-start movements of anyone brandishing a rifle. “I think they know when you mean them harm,” he says. On average only one in three expeditions results in him shooting his quarry. 

After several hours’ tracking, we are forced to admit defeat; our cause not helped by a brisk wind (something which puts the deer ill at ease) and a dog walker shouting after a wayward terrier in the woods. 

But back in the estate freezers, there are two roe deer that Blunden has killed in the past few days. They have been skinned and gralloched (the process by which the internal organs are removed) and waiting to be butchered. Everything here that gets shot gets eaten. 

Bill Biddell, 63, who runs the estate with his wife Bridget (whose grandparents bought the land and adjoining 18th-century manor house in 1928), says they now run “meat days” every six weeks or so where they sell the meat from their herd of pasture-fed Sussex cattle directly to customers. Wild roe venison is proving increasingly popular, with visitors snapping up sausages, fillets and diced meat for casseroles. They also sell venison mince, which one customer has slightly unfortunately branded “Bambi bolognese”.

Biddell says they have hosted two venison tasting days, where hundreds of people packed into the estate courtyard to witness a deer being skinned and butchered before trying the meat. He says this lack of squeamishness is due to people enjoying the connection between the natural world and the meat they eat, compared with shrink-wrapped and intensively farmed supermarket produce. 

As for how best to cook venison, his advice is simple. “We always tell people you have to cook it fast and really hot and leave it to rest,” he says.

Biddell and his estate team are supportive of wider efforts to introduce wild venison into the British diet. As Will Godwin, the 42-year-old estate farm manager, explains to me while at the same time expertly butchering a roe deer carcase, the meat is fat-free and far more nutritious than intensively farmed animals. 

He points to NHS projects such as the East Lancashire Hospital Trust, which has been using deer-cull meat supplied by Forestry England to serve venison pies and casseroles to patients. At Hampton they are currently in discussions with partners within the Surrey Hills National Landscape to implement similar plans to make the meat more freely available. 

Elsewhere, The Country Food Trust, a not-for-profit organisation set up by the Michelin-star-winning chef Mike Robinson, has over the past year established a project donating wild venison to food banks while at the same time attempting to double the amount of wild venison served in British restaurants.

Will Godwin, knife in hand and his apron stained with blood, stresses that the plan is not to eradicate deer, but instead to halve the estate’s population to around 80 and then manage it at sustainable levels. 

“We love the deer,” he says. “It would be a gross mismanagement and a tragedy if we shot them into oblivion. Red and roe have been here [in Britain] since the [last] ice age and are very much part of the landscape.”

The ultimate aim is to restore balance in ecosystems across the land being farmed. And in the continued absence of any natural predators to do our dirty work, that means dishing up plenty more Bambi bolognese.