Authors
David M. Forsyth, Anthony Pople and Graham Nugent
Summary
Deer (Family Cervidae) have long been highly valued by people for their economic and resource values, as well as for aesthetic, cultural and spiritual reasons (Baker et al. 2014). Consequently, deer have been translocated far and wide, both within their ancestral strongholds in Eurasia and the Americas and, Antarctica aside, to all other continents (Long 2003; Nugent et al., in press). For Australia, the main motivation for the initial introductions in the 1800s and early 1900s appears to have been a combination of an enthusiastic interest in exotic species and a desire to recreate a resource symbolic of the wealth, power and prestige long associated with deer hunting in Europe in general (and Britain in particular) but more accessible to the common person. That motivation was clearly strong, because importing non-native deer into Australia in the 1800s was a major undertaking, involving long sea voyages in small sailing ships, with deer survival often depending on luck.
Acclimatisation societies established captive breeding populations of deer so that more individuals could be released (Bentley 1998). Following release, these new deer populations were sometimes strictly protected from hunting for decades to help ensure their establishment and spread, a practice that continued until as recently as the 1980s. Indeed, the establishment of a new fallow deer (Dama dama) population on public land at Koetong, north-east Victoria, was actively supported by the state government during the 1970s and 1980s (Phillips 1985), and deer are today managed as game in Victoria and Tasmania.
The advent of deer farming as a profitable enterprise in the 1970s and 1980s led to deer being captured from the wild, bred in captivity and then moved around the country to establish new farms. New wild populations have established from deer escaping from farms, and also from the deliberate (but now illegal) release by people wanting to establish new populations for hunting (Moriarty 2004). Wild deer are now present in all Australian states and territories.
With the benefit of hindsight, the effort spent establishing wild deer populations in Australia now seems misplaced, but it is only in the last two decades that there has been a focus on understanding and managing the undesirable impacts of deer in Australia. For example, a review of mammal pests in the late 1990s did not specify undesirable impacts for any of the six species of wild deer established in Australia (table 1 in Cowan and Tyndale-Biscoe 1997). A 2004 review of the economic costs of vertebrate pests did not consider deer in any depth but noted that ‘so far they are only minor agricultural pests but their range and abundance is increasing’ (McLeod 2004: p. 63). Since then, two national workshops, in 2005 (McLeod 2009) and 2016 (Forsyth et al. 2017), have brought public land managers, researchers and other stakeholders together to identify common issues and knowledge gaps. The latter workshop led to the Federal Government coinvesting [with state government agencies in Victoria, New South Wales (NSW), Queensland and South Australia] in research into the impacts and management of wild deer in Australia. The Australian Research Council has also invested in Linkage Projects investigating the impacts and ecology of wild deer.