Bolderwood deer talk podcast. Transcript.

Hello, welcome to Bolderwood!

If you follow the signs to the Deer Viewing platform you will leave the car park, cross the road, and the platform will be about 100 metres down the hill.

Here we feed the deer every day around 2pm between Easter and mid-September. We give them rolled maize but the deer do not rely on this to survive as it serves merely as a tasty snack for them. However, over the years they have come to look forward to this daily treat and although the herd is not tame they are more tolerant of people and so you can get a good close-up view of these lovely animals.

The species you see here are fallow deer. These can be found throughout the New Forest. Other species in the forest are Roe, Sika and Red Deer. Roe are more solitary in habit and can also be seen in most parts of the Forest. Red Deer tend to remain around the Brockenhurst area whilst Sika are found South of the Weymouth-Waterloo railway line in the Beaulieu direction. The railway line acts as a convenient and effective barrier as the Red Deer and Sika deer would otherwise interbreed.

The Fallow Deer here at Bolderwood may vary in colour. Apart from the more common sandy colour you may see white ones. These are not albino but just a colour variation and the official name for this colouring is Bohemian. You may also see very dark or black deer, known as melanistic and also there may be paler ones with very pronounced spotting. This beautiful variation is called menil. 

The Deer with antlers are the bucks and you can easily recognise a mature fallow buck by the flat section of antler or "palmation" as it is called. The antlers grow rapidly from the beginning of May until mid August - a period of about sixteen weeks. During this time the antlers are covered in velvet with blood vessels running though them and then, at the end of August, the velvet comes off to reveal the hard antler, which is then ready for the autumn rut. The buck retains the antlers until the end of April when they are cast and new ones immediately begin the cycle of growth again.  For more details and diagrams of antler growth, look at the information board on the deer viewing platform.

As mentioned the rut takes place in the Autumn and the does give birth to their fawns from the end of May until early June. There are normally around 1200 fallow deer in the New Forest - the new arrivals increase this number considerably but the winter cull restores the balance again. The cull is carried out by the Keepers within a total Deer Management Programme, which seeks to maintain all deer numbers at a level that is optimum for the New Forest. In this way we achieve very healthy, disease-free animals with sufficient natural food supplies. 

The Forestry Commission Information Centre, which is situated in the picnic area adjacent to the Car Park, is open at weekends between Easter and the end of October and also every day during school holidays in that period. For more information on deer, or indeed any other topic related to the New Forest, talk to the Rangers there who will be pleased to assist

Thank you for coming to Bolderwood. We hope you have enjoyed your visit.