Irish muntjac – myth or menace?

“The wild deer wandering here and there,” wrote William Blake in Auguries of Innocence, “doth free the human soul from care.” While undoubtedly true in many instances, this line does rather suggest that while he may have been a poet and painter par excellence, he didn’t make his living from trees or crops.

In fairness to Blake, back in the first decade of the 19th century, when the poem was penned, Britain had not yet seen the introduction of either the Tapanese sika or the muntjac. Later in the century both arrived, thrived and are now firmly established. But just a short hop across the Irish Sea, the situation is somewhat different – while sika were introduced in 1860 by the seventh Lord Powerscourt to his estate in County Wicklow, the muntjac remained foreign to