Day 136 - Delightful Deer at Super Studley Part 1

Herd of deer under a fabulous old tree

Hi all today's Day 136 and as you probably know I was at Ripon at the weekend and I saw quite a lot during my day out there. We made a little stop at Studley Royal, part of the National Trust site which includes the fabulous Fountains Abbey. This is full of fantastic old trees in lovely parkland and we were not surprised to see loads of Deer as it is home to over 500 wild deer. The ones we saw were just sat next to the road feeding.

They are fantastic creatures and I thought I'd do a mini series on them, so here's a few facts to start off with:

• Studley Royal is near to Fountains Abbey which is one of the 4 main abbeys in North Yorkshire, Bylands, Rievaulx, Jervaux and of course, Fountains. They're all fabulous!

Taking an interest in me and my camera

• The Deer Park at Studley is, of course, where we saw the deer. The park was formerly home to Studley Royal House which was largely destroyed by fire in 1716 and then restored 50 years later. This restoration was then destroyed again by fire in 1946. This was then demolished shortly afterwards.

• The Deer family has 44 species in it! At Studley we saw Red Deer, Sika Deer and Fallow Deer.

• Apart from the Chinese Water Deer which have tusks, all male Deer have antlers. With Reindeer though, both genders have antlers.

• Hybrid deer are apparently very fertile animals and in The Origin of Species Charles Darwin mentioned them.

A fantastic stag

• He wrote 'I do not know of any thoroughly well-authenticated cases of perfectly fertile hybrid animals, I have reason to believe that the hybrids from Cervulus vaginalis and Reevisii are perfectly fertile'.

• The two types of Muntjac Deer mentioned above are currently considered the same species.

• There are at least 20 coats of arms that have deer on them. These are a few of them: Chile's Coat of Arms, Northern Ireland's Coat of Arms, Dassel, Germany's Coat of Arms, Voss, Norway's Coat of Arms and Umea, Sweden Coat of Arms.

Stag relaxed amongst a group of hinds

• The expression 'eat humble pie' obviously comes from the Humble Pie. This is actually made out of Deer Organ meat called Humble. This can go nicely alongside of Venison which is the main meat of Deer.

• Deer in the U.S.A cause a lot of economic damage. The collisions on roads cause on average $1.1 billion in damage annually.

Here are some links to some information:

Wikipedia - Deer

BBC Nature - Deer

Hope you enjoyed, more to follow in part 2.

Z.