The return of the native

Most people don’t realise that many of the roe deer here in the UK were introduced, says Graham Downing

- Graham Downing

Conventional wisdom holds that, of the six species of deer encountered wild in Britain today, only two — the roe and red — are native to these islands. While true on the face of it, that represents only part of the full picture. A considerable proportion of the roe deer emerging at dawn on to a forest ride, or sunning themselves among the drifts of bluebells, bear little or no connection to the roe that roamed the broadleaved forests of Britain 5,000 years ago.

When the ice sheets of the last glaciation retreated and waves of temperate plants and animals moved northwards across the land bridge that then connected Britain and continental Europe, roe were among them. During the ice age, they, along with other deer species, had been confined to ‘refugia’ in the warmer regions of southern and south-eastern Europe, and it was these pioneer animals that became part of the truly natural fauna of the British Isles.

It is only in recent years that genetic science has been able to determine accurately the origins of our roe deer, but the ability to extract DNA from ancient bones has indeed determined that Britain’s roe followed this route across northern Europe. The British population underwent a rapid expansion during an establishment period between 5,000 and 6,000 years before present, then beginning to stabilise from about 4,000 years before.

In the 1300s, roe were downgraded from a ‘beast of the forest’ to a ‘beast of the warren’

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