The October deer rut, a five-hundred-year-old oak and the green birds that Amsterdam and London have in common
The Stags Are Roaring in Richmond Park and the Parakeets Are Laughing at Them
You hear it before you see anything. I came through the gate at seven with frost on the bracken and my breath in front of me, and from somewhere in the mist came a sound like a cow being slowly strangled inside a metal barrel. Then another, further off, answering. I stood still and grinned like a fool. It is October, and the red deer are rutting.
We have deer at home in the Netherlands, in the Veluwe, and people queue in their cars at dusk to see the rut there. But I know of no other great city where you can take a suburban train and a bus and, forty minutes from the centre, stand among several hundred wild deer doing what their ancestors did before there was a city at all.
The Park
Richmond Park is a thousand hectares of rough grassland, bracken, ponds and ancient trees in the south-west of London, enclosed by a king in the 1630s for hunting and shut in by a wall eight miles round. It is a national nature reserve. There are about six hundred deer, red and fallow, and they have shaped everything. The trees are browsed flat underneath to exactly the height a deer can reach, so that you can see straight through beneath the branches. It gives the place the look of a painting.
The Rut
For most of the year the stags live quietly together. In autumn something in the shortening days turns them into different animals. Their necks thicken. They stop eating. They wallow in mud, thrash their antlers in the bracken until they wear it like a wig, and roar, hour after hour, to gather hinds and warn off rivals.
I watched one for an hour from a safe distance. The park asks you to stay at least fifty metres away and it is serious advice; a red stag weighs as much as two large men and is not thinking clearly. He had about fifteen hinds, who grazed and ignored him entirely. He trotted round them with his head back, bellowing, steam coming off him. A younger stag approached. The two walked side by side, stiff-legged, each measuring the other. This is how most contests end. The smaller one thought better of it and turned away. Only when they are evenly matched do they lock antlers, and then it is violent and can be fatal.
By the end of the month he will have lost a fifth of his weight and will go into the winter exhausted. Some do not survive it. There is nothing sensible about any of this, and I say that as a member of a species that came up with the office party.
People
I must record, as a scientist, the behaviour of the other large mammal present. There were perhaps thirty photographers around the same stag, some with lenses longer than my arm. Most kept back. A few did not. One man crept forward on his knees to within fifteen metres. The stag swung his head and looked at him and the man froze, and I held my breath. Then the stag roared in his face and turned away, and the man retreated with what I can only call a new respect for nature. Every year someone is hurt. I would be glad if it were explained in more languages on the signs.
The Oaks
The deer are the spectacle. The trees are the treasure. There are more than a thousand veteran trees in the park, most of them oaks, some of them five, six, seven hundred years old. They are hollow, split, half dead and wholly magnificent. An old oak supports more forms of life than any other tree in northern Europe: more than two thousand species have been counted using them, from lichens and fungi to bats and owls.
The decaying wood is the important part. The larva of the stag beetle, the largest beetle in Britain, lives for years in rotting oak below the ground before the adult flies for a few weeks in June. Tidy people remove dead wood. The park leaves it lying where it falls, fenced off, to rot in peace. London is one of the best places in the country for stag beetles because of that. In my own country, where we are tidier, they are very rare.
I ate my bread and cheese with my back against one of the great ones. A nuthatch came down the trunk head first to see what I had. A jay was burying acorns thirty metres off, one at a time, each pushed carefully into the turf and covered. Jays forget a good share of what they hide. Many of the oaks around me were planted by a bird with a poor memory.
The Green Birds
And all the while, overhead, screeching, the parakeets. Bright green, long-tailed, with a red bill and a thin rose-coloured collar on the males. They come from India and Africa and they are everywhere in London now, in tens of thousands. They were pulling apart the sweet chestnuts above me and dropping the husks on my head.
The English tell wonderful stories about how they arrived. That a famous rock guitarist released a pair in Carnaby Street in the 1960s. That they escaped from a film set at Shepperton during the making of a picture with Humphrey Bogart. I was told the guitarist version by a man in a pub with total confidence. The dull truth, according to the people who have studied it, is that pet birds escaped or were let go many times over many years, and found that a mild city full of bird tables suited them.
I know this because we have exactly the same birds in Amsterdam, in the Vondelpark, and in The Hague, and nobody there blames a guitarist. They arrived the same way. Whether they harm native birds by taking nest holes is still being argued. I admit I like them. They are loud, foreign, entirely at home and impossible to ignore. I feel a certain kinship.
The Reading
On the bus home I looked at the pages as usual. Mongabay had a long piece on wildlife trade, which is where parakeets come into it. The Sierra Club had something on old forests. And then I turned to my employer, The London Prat, and read the London satirical news to recover.
The guitarist story has interested my colleagues for years, because it is a perfect example of a tale people prefer to the truth. The paper’s essay on what satirical commentary is, and what it is not draws the line carefully: a joke everyone knows to be a joke is one thing, and a false story passed on in earnest is another. The parakeet legend began, I suspect, as the first and has become the second. The man in the pub was not joking. I did not correct him. He was enjoying himself too much. Should he ever wish to know better, I shall send him to the British Onion pages to see how the thing is properly done.
Evening
Home, boots off, list written. Red deer, fallow deer, a fox, a kestrel hovering over the bracken, green woodpecker, the nuthatch, the jay, skylarks still singing over the open ground. Parakeets beyond counting.
I can still hear the roaring. I think I shall hear it in my sleep. I hope that stag gets through the winter.
The season so far is recorded in these pages.