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Nature featuresYou are in: North Yorkshire > Nature > Nature features > All things deer All things deerFor the 600 deer at Fountains Abbey deer park, the winter season can be tough with cold weather causing illness amongst the herd. Deer warden John Horrigan far prefers the spring and summer!  Roaming around the 360 acre park near Ripon are 600 deer. Records show there have been deer there since the 1600s, when the Studley Royal estate was separate from Fountains Abbey. At the time, fallow deer were seen as a status symbol, and as such were introduced to the park. The sika arrived much later - in 1973. But nobody knows when the red deer came.
The deer warden at Studley Royal is John Corrigan. It's his job to ensure the deer are safe and in good health, and can't get through the fences that surround the park. John started as a park ranger, but when the previous deer warden retired he decided to go for the job. As John says, it's a wonderful way to earn a living. But there are times when things get difficult. A long, cold winter...For the six hundred deer that graze the Studley Royal estate at Fountains Abbey, the winter can be especially tough. According to John, "On average I usually lose ten or so deer a year, but if we have a particularly bad winter it can be as many as 25".  The Asian sika deer One of the main problems is with the ground - because if it's a wet winter the deer lay on water-logged ground, which has had fatal consequences for some of the younger ones. The grass can also taken a long time to grow, so John has to feed the deer extra hay and nuts to make sure they stay fat enough to stay warm. Spring forward...But when spring arrives things start to look up. The grass is beginning to grow and the stags' antlers are beginning to drop off. Normally, this happens between February and April. John says it's really quite comical watching the stags fight when they've not got any antlers. At this time of year, fighting is just a ritual, but in another six months, when their new antlers have fully grown back, it means much more. The strongest and most powerful male gets a 'harem', a group of females for mating.  Young red deer Bambi season!Of course, the result of all that mating is lots of fawns! June and July are by far John's favourite months of the year. The volunteers who help him on a regular basis are unsurprisingly keen on this time of year too. "You get to be really close to the deer - we put a colour coded tag in the ear, so I know how old the animal is. It's just incredible, being so close. I get a big kick out of that". But with 200 or so deer being born into the group every year, it's important to ensure a similar number leave the group. Some are sold on to game dealers. Older, more poorly deer, are shot. Then the group is back to 600. The fighting between the stags begins again, they mate with the females as a result, and then the winter comes, and the whole process begins again. last updated: 31/03/2008 at 11:05 You are in: North Yorkshire > Nature > Nature features > All things deer
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