First post
May 24th 2022
Welcome to the Roewatch blog. As this is the very first post I would like to introduce myself - John Halliday - a roe deer ‘geek’ with over 45 years spent watching, photographing, filming, studying, reading about, tracking, stalking, managing, controlling, butchering and eating these intriguing animals. If you watch the videos on the main page of the website you will learn more about how I began and developed my interest over the years - culminating in a memoir. When I haven’t been up a tree watching and waiting or getting up at unsocial summer hours I fitted in a career as a lawyer and then as a psychotherapist. My other great passion has been literature and I am seldom without a book to read. I will soon complete reading all 52 winners of the Booker prize for which I am making a ‘booker’ case. I know it’s terrible pun but I’m an amateur woodworker and will allow me time in my new workshop.
Since retirement my wife and I have been working on 17.5 acres of land which we bought to turn into a nature reserve with the intention of leaving it to Northumberland Wildlife Trust when we become too decrepit to manage it ourselves. A lot of the photographs and films which will feature on the blog have been taken on this patch of land. OK that’s quite enough about me but if you have questions or want to know more you can always get me at roewatch3@gmail.com. and I’ll get back to you.
I will be posting from time to time as events relating to the deer catch my eye. This could be more than once a week or weekly or with even longer gaps between. The overall theme will be ‘what is happening in deer world’ at the moment. So let’s go.
May is an intriguing month and not a bad place to start. The deer however are not looking their best! They are in the process of shedding their brown/grey winter coat and letting their foxy red summer coat emerge.
As the change is happening they look terribly scruffy and you might be tempted to think they are in poor condition. You can see on ‘Scruffy doe’ how the old coat is dropping out and there are patches underneath where the summer coat is beginning to show. Not all the animals change their coat at precisely the same time and you can see scruffy beasts for as long as 4 to 6 weeks until they have all turned red.
One thing you can see almost every time you spot a deer is that they love eating. It has been estimated that they have a taste for more than 150 different species of plants, shrubs and trees. Roe, unlike the bigger deer species, like Red and Fallow, are browsers rather than grazers. As they move along they pick at this and that as they go and having lived successfully for over four hundred thousand years they have worked out what they like and what is safe for them to eat - which is pretty much everything. I will have a great deal to say as the blog develops about roe diet but for now watch this pair of yearlings, a buck (the one with the antlers) and his doe ‘sister’ browsing near a stream and eating water avens.