Shooting and Fishing: Muntjac deer

MUNTJAC deer hardly ever stand still and are the size of a decent springer spaniel

As I think I said last week, my brother in Suffolk doesn’t shoot, mainly because he has other things to do; like raise four children and endure a massive commute. But while we were staying with him, shooting nearby, we went off to inspect his vegetables and the pears and the apples, still going strong in mid November, and to discuss the wayward meanderings of a gigantic Madame Alfred Carrière.

As it happened, the rose and a dozen others had been stripped almost bare and were surrounded by tiny little hoofmarks. Very small roe deer in Suffolk, I ventured scoffingly. No, muntjac, he said. Now muntjac has yet to reach us, although one has been spotted in Renfrewshire apparently. And rather surprisingly the minister for deer, Richard Lochhead, has declared muntjac should be slaughtered on sight before they become the pest they are in much of England.

They are, of course, foreign, let loose by a Duke of Bedford in 1894, the same duke who sent 100,000 Loch Leven trout to Kashmir where they still breed, as indeed do the muntjac he brought back from China.

Like grey squirrels they are now legion and thanks to animal rescue people putting run-over muntjac back in the wild rather than out of their misery they are all over the south and heading this way.

If you can shoot one they make very good eating. But unlike roe or fallow deer they browse in woodland and gardens rather than in the open, hardly ever stand still for more than a few seconds and are about the size of a decent springer spaniel. So not very spottable.

But they will come onto the edge of thickets in the early morning and I do not doubt they would be attracted to a block of cattle lick, yum yum, which roe find very enticing. Still, we didn’t have any lick, although we did have a .22 which is allowable for shooting muntjac although the larger caliber .243 might be better.

What we also had was my brother’s unfinished tree house, which he has been building for so long in the middle of a thick hedgerow that his children have completely gone off the idea.

But the frame and veranda is up as is the house, even though it doesn’t have a floor. So he pointed out where the muntjac might appear and paced out the distance and put in pegs and zeroed the rifle sights. The next morning we got up at six and crept out, falling over the electric horse tape and clambered into the tree house and saw absolutely nothing except 18 beautiful fallow does which are unshootable with a .22. Next time we take the .243. Something to plan and a meal to look forward to.