Deer populations are expanding in Britain. Wytham woods too has suffered from a massive increase in deer numbers in recent years, not least due to being surrounded by deer fencing, closing in the population.

When deer numbers are too high they can cause extensive damage to the forest by bark stripping and over-grazing. This effectively prevents natural regeneration while destroying the ground fauna that is the home to many other mammal species and ground-nesting birds. Therefore there is an increasing need for carefully planned deer management.

In Wytham there are 3 species of deer: Fallow, Roe and Muntjac. In order to manage deer numbers at sustainable levels a carefully planned annual cull is necessary, but in order to achieve the right balance successfully, one must first know how many deer one is dealing with.

It is very difficult to attempt to count deer numbers directly, unless they are in open ground in a parkland habitat. Eyeshine census methods can be used at night, but a popular and frequently used method is to assess numbers through the accumulation of their droppings.

Volunteers were broken into 2 teams of 6 and, under the supervision of a researcher, set out to count the droppings in 10 x 10m quadrats selected to represent all the major habitat types in the woods. Volunteers measured out the quadrat with surveying poles then lined up along one edge and walked a transect across the quadrat “ “forensic-style” to search for deer droppings to be identified to species. Piles, of droppings, rather than individual pellets, were counted.

124 quadrats were surveyed for deer droppings.

These results were calculated from established species-specific defecation rates (taking into account the area of the woods and the time available for dropping accumulation) to produce a figure for deer abundance.

This method is rather crude, as it assumes that deer droppings will never be found older than 3 weeks due to decomposition. However, we can compare the veracity of these data against estimates of deer numbers for the woods produced by a deer research project in association with the British Deer Society, who manage the deer population at Wytham. Again, dropping counts are used, in conjunction with observational data from stalkers, to produce their figures. The comparison is most encouraging: The BDS estimate for fallow deer is around 130 (c/w 129) for this period. For roe deer our estimate exceeds theirs by some margin (65 c/w 35). This could be due to misclassification of droppings by volunteers. Both sources of data consider muntjac numbers to be low to negligible.