Red and Roe together

ths84

Well-Known Member
Had a lovely surprise this evening whilst driving as came around a bend and there was a stunning Red stag with two hinds in tow mingling with a large group of fallow.

Red aren't native too the area but a large number was let out from a local farm a while back and they are gradually spreading out which is lovely to see!

So so my question is has anyone else with these species in one area seen them hanging around together?

Ps the Red stags are having a lovely rut down here with 3 of the big boys sat in my mates garden taking it in turns at each other (trailcam now installed)

pps - realised I put the wrong deer species in the title, should be Fallow not Roe
 
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I have a permission near monmouth, on the west side. I have seen roe on two occasions. But never red?, roughly where are you talking about? Elmer, I believe you have a patch further up towards the course, it maybe good to meet up someime with 8x57.
Regards Karamoja
 
I have a permission near monmouth, on the west side. I have seen roe on two occasions. But never red?, roughly where are you talking about? Elmer, I believe you have a patch further up towards the course, it maybe good to meet up someime with 8x57.
Regards Karamoja

yeah anytime.

There are two different groups of red, one has over 30 animals and the other which is only a couple of miles away has about 20 or more, not sure exactly as the land owner is very protective of them but I know a farmer opposite who told me there are at least 20.

The group of 30 have also been protected for a long time but the farmer has now had enough of the damage and has asked me to sort them out.
 
It's looking as if there may soon be enough of us for just a Monmouth meet. :lol:

I have to admit that I first heard of the small herd of reds only a couple of years back when Macberran told me of them. I've since heard a bit more about them at a meeting of the lower Wye valley deer management group and as Elmer says I am told that there are in fact two small groups of deer. My first thoughts when I heard of them was that they must have originated from escapees from Lydney Park but I have been informed that this is not the case.
 
Oh, Ok the group near Chepstow!!! I jumped to the wrong conclusion and thought he meant around monmouth!!! That makes more sense to me now.
It would be great to have a meet up soon!!! When and where?
Regards Karamoja
 
I asked the FC about these reds and their view is that there is a group of up to 20 that generally hang out on the English bank of the lower Wye valley but occasionally cross the river and turn up in the general Trellech area from time to time. This may or may not be accurate but there were also rumours of reds in the Abergavenny area originating from farm stock and a stag was shot at Llansoy a year or so ago. The FC are not currently culling any Forest of Dean reds.

Previous occasional stags that turned up in the forest were reckoned to have probably come from Eastnor Castle near Ledbury, but this was not for certain. I thought that Lydney park only had fallow and the nearest other park/wild reds are probably in Berkeley Castle across the Severn.

The stags seem to be of very good quality and this suggests a good genetic background.
 
Paul Lydney Park may only have fallow now but some years ago they did have a herd of reds. On one occasion about thirty years ago they bought a large stag from another estate that was almost immediately taken by poachers. It was necessary to issue public warnings about being offered venison on the cheap as it was thought that the meat may still be tainted with imobilin or whatever the sedative was that they used to capture and transport the animal.
 
Paul Lydney Park may only have fallow now but some years ago they did have a herd of reds. On one occasion about thirty years ago they bought a large stag from another estate that was almost immediately taken by poachers. It was necessary to issue public warnings about being offered venison on the cheap as it was thought that the meat may still be tainted with imobilin or whatever the sedative was that they used to capture and transport the animal.

Ok, I missed that, I used to go to the park in the late 1960s and it was just fallow then. The red herd must have been prior to that or later in the 1980s possibly. The comment about poachers is interesting as a similar thing happened at Monmouth around the 1970s. The owners of Wyastone Leys caught up some wild fallow does in an enclosure and then bought a couple of nice park bucks up from Sussex to improve the heads. Sadly they lasted only a few months as the local poachers thought it was making some sort of point to shoot them through the wire, I think with a crossbow.

Although the Forest of Dean bucks have good body weights, Edgar Gwilliam (former FC ranger) told me he'd shot one at 215lb (I don't know whether that was in the jacket or dead weight) , they don't seem to have good palmation by and large and this was an attempt to improve. I haven't spent much time in the forest recently, have heads improved at all?

This is a page from a book on the Forest of Dean and it shows the big buck that Edgar shot and another that has very similar antler shape, both are quite heavy in terms of antler weight but the palms seem incomplete at the top if you see what I mean. They seem to come to a point at the front edge rather than a blunt top. The top buck is melanistic as quite a large proportion of the main forest deer were at the time, in the outlying woods like Highmeadow they were far less prevalent.

 
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The reds in Lydney Park were in the late seventies and early eighties, I don't think that they were there for very long.

I wouldn't know about the quality of the heads in the FOD Paul or for that matter their body weights. All I know is that all I have seen on my little patch above Monmouth and the new one (thanks to Karamojo) is does and the odd very young buck. I did see one buck hiding under the trees right on the boundary of my ground some months back (out of season) that looked to be of reasonable size but if he had been wearing a massive hat rack I couldn't have seen it because of the trees and the shadows. I just keep dreaming and hoping.
 
The reds in Lydney Park were in the late seventies and early eighties, I don't think that they were there for very long.

I wouldn't know about the quality of the heads in the FOD Paul or for that matter their body weights. All I know is that all I have seen on my little patch above Monmouth and the new one (thanks to Karamojo) is does and the odd very young buck. I did see one buck hiding under the trees right on the boundary of my ground some months back (out of season) that looked to be of reasonable size but if he had been wearing a massive hat rack I couldn't have seen it because of the trees and the shadows. I just keep dreaming and hoping.

I don't know if it's still the case but we often found the bigger bucks hanging out in quite small woods away from the main blocks and just coming in for the rut, they were also fairly nocturnal. I used to spend hours and hours in the Highmeadow Woods just watching the deer over a period from the late 1960s to 1980 and in all that time I saw a master buck on a relatively few occasions outside the rut. One March day I came upon a group of six mature bucks not far from Staunton, that's the only occasion when I saw a bachelor group of mature bucks in Highmeadow. During the rut you could hear bucks all over the place between Monmouth and Staunton but as soon as the rut ended they disappeared.

More typically you'd find the mature bucks alone once in hard antler, there was one living in a small wood near Ganarew, we had the wood on our rough shoot and every time we shot there this buck came out with my mate's lab a few metres behind and set off for Newton Court just fast enough to keep clear of the dog. It got almost comical as the weeks went by. The best FoD buck I got was shot in my back garden on the Kymin, 27" in length but no palms to speak of.
 
On my patch I have only ever seen a bachelor group of mature master bucks once.vThey did hang around for a month or so were spookier than hell and then were gone. Mainly it's does, prickets and sorrels. And they do seem to be increasing in density over the last few years. But still they are very transient. I am still waiting for the boat to arrive but they are still a mile away.
K
 
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