Muntjac and Chinese water deer for continental stalkers

Almost every continental big game hunter is familiar with roe, red and sometimes fallow deer. Sika are unusual but recognisable. Muntjac and Chinese water deer are the two that candidates have often never seen at all, and both appear in the visual assessment.

They are worth an evening each, which is more attention than their size suggests. In a photograph, a species you have never met is not a species you identify slowly — it is one you get wrong.

Muntjac

Muntiacus reevesi, introduced and now widespread across England and pushing north. Small, roughly the height of a large dog, and unmistakable in profile once you have seen it: the back slopes steeply upward to the rump, so the animal looks permanently hunched.

• The buck carries short antlers on long pedicles — bony stalks rising from the skull — usually a simple spike with a small brow tine. He also carries visible upper canines.
• The doe has no antlers and a smaller head.
• Both have dark facial stripes running up from the eyes to the pedicles, which is the feature that survives poor light in a photograph.

The legal point the written module returns to: muntjac breed all year round, so there is no closed season for the doe. A species with no closed season behaves differently in a cull programme from one with a season, and the assessment expects you to know why.

Chinese water deer

Hydropotes inermis, found mainly in East Anglia and the fens, and the species that most reliably catches candidates out — because the identifying feature is an absence.

No antlers, on either sex, ever. The buck instead carries long upper canines that show below the lip. The head is rounded with large dark eyes set wide and conspicuously large rounded ears, giving a face quite unlike any other British deer. The coat is a plain sandy brown with no rump patch worth the name.

Once you have looked at one properly you will not mistake it. The failure is never confusion with another species; it is hesitation, because a candidate who has not studied it spends the slide wondering whether the antlers are simply out of frame.

Why they are in the assessment at all

Both are introduced species with expanding ranges, both fall under UK deer legislation, and both turn up on ground where a continental stalker might well find himself. Knowing them is not trivia. A stalker who cannot separate a muntjac doe from a small roe doe in failing light is a stalker who will eventually take the wrong animal in the wrong season.

How to study them before the assessment

• Work from photographs, not illustrations. A plate in a book flatters the diagnostic features. The assessment uses photographs, and so does the field.
• Look at the outline first. Muntjac slope; roe do not. That judgement survives distance and bad light better than coat colour does.
• Learn the sex and age terms. Both species use buck, doe and fawn. Getting those right matters for the second half of the visual assessment, where you are asked for sex as well as species.
• Spend your last evening on the confusions, not the certainties. Summer sika against fallow, and winter sika against red, cost more marks than these two do — but only if you have already put the work into these two, because the unfamiliar species is the one you hesitate over.

The training session over dinner the evening before the assessment exists largely for this. Bring your questions to it.