Drs Tim & Rory Nevard

Let’s set the scene: a fresh dry season morning on a remote cattle station in Northern Australia; Brolgas begin their morning bugling from the swamp; galahs take their first drink from the chilly water troughs near the windmill; the morning light filters through rising dust, as ringers begin to rustle-up for a day working weaners through the yards. Cross at all this activity, a tired-looking Chital stag tries a tentative bellow, as his elegant harem of hinds begins to move back to the shade of the melaleucas along the creek line. But the station manager is working and too busy to be moved: “they’re pests” – he says angrily – “off eating the grass meant for my cattle…”

Australia is a unique continent, with an even more unique history of large land-based mammals. Gone now, its tropical savannah woodlands were once home to a rich and diverse marsupial megafauna, living alongside our current kangaroos, finches and goannas. But their ghosts remain behind the herds of cattle and other species for those with the imagination to see them. Indeed it is probably an accident of geography - the slim but deep 20km stretch of water between Bali and Lombok (forming part of Wallace’s placental/marsupial separation line) - that is the reason Australia’s megafauna didn’t include relatives of Banteng, Buffalo, Rusa and Sambar and why the grey ear tips of Eastern Grey Kangaroos pop into view when we’re glassing the flats. But that’s not the end of the story.

With the demise of its megafauna and associated wide range of grazers and browsers, Australia’s tropical savannahs must have seemed strangely empty until cattle turned up and began to fill long-vacant grazing niches, accompanied by a huge raft of African, Asian and South American grasses, shrubs and trees. Their fellow travellers, brumbies, pigs, goats and donkeys also arrived to fill and take over niches too, with their own impacts on the native fauna, along with the introduced flora, which now occupies millions of square kilometres of tropical Australia. So where do deer fit into this picture? Like our station manager, many graziers and rangeland scientists believe that deer compete directly with cattle, especially when grazing resources are tight. But do they really?

Reinhold Hofmann, a visionary veterinary biologist, who pole-vaulted over the Berlin Wall to become a professor of veterinary medicine at Nairobi and Giessen universities, and once the Wall came down, returned to become director of the Leibnitz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, back in Berlin. ‘Rhino’, as Hofmann was inevitably known after his stint in Nairobi, was fascinated by how many species of grazing and browsing ruminants could occupy the same bit of country and, being a skilled anatomist, began to look at their stomachs and digestive structures. What his work definitively shows is that different ruminant stomach morphologies are clearly adapted to dealing with distinctive diets, whether different plant species or different growth stages of the same plant.

The diagram below is adapted from Hofmann’s work on Asian grazers and browsers and shows how each of tropical Australia’s current tropical ruminant species can be assigned to a foraging type based on its stomach morphology: concentrate selectors (browsers); intermediate/mixed feeders; and roughage grazers. What this infers is that where Chital and/or Rusa occur alongside Zebu (Brahman) cattle or each other, based on their own unique stomach morphologies, their diets will predictably overlap relatively little; effectively separating them ecologically and non-competitively in normal (non-drought) circumstances.

So our station manager is probably wrong about his Chital, mistaking shared occupation with competition. This seems such a counter-intuitive concept that he’s not alone and so we desperately need high quality, balanced research to place wild Australian deer in their ecological context – especially in relation to extensively managed domestic livestock, as well as other naturalised species and native wildlife.

Deer in Australia’s tropics have followed a challenging and complex road to the present. The early colonial era saw the establishment of deer populations on the Coburg (Gurig) Peninsula, the Torres Strait, around Charters Towers and in the Brisbane Valley. There are even enigmatic hints of First Nations’ knowledge of deer in Kimberley rock art. More recently populations of Rusa and Chital have been established in pockets of coastal and inland areas of Queensland – now all under some level of threat from eradication-based culling. To properly examine the underlying need for this, we need sound unbiased evidence from balanced, even-handed research.

We are a fundamentally multicultural nation and have learned that to live and grow together our differences must be celebrated, not stigmatised. If Hofmann is right, the ecological roles of Australian deer from India, Indonesia and Europe in the current ‘feral’ narrative have been misunderstood and have a right to be seen as no less Australian than any of us, or our domestic livestock.

So, when you next chase Rusa or Chital, put down your rifle or bow, sit with your binoculars and your back against a tree and take in the deer, the birds, the kangaroos and the cattle, noting how they interact with each other. Consider the fundamentally important roles deer play in our environment – both ecologically and socially. An African safari may cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the pressure from a burgeoning global population continues to fray the tattered edges of what were once wild places. So take half an hour to remind yourself that we have our own unique Australian safari, right here. There’s more to deer than hunting…

Dr Tim Nevard OAM is a director of ADA and an adjunct professor at James Cook University’s Cairns Institute. He is interested in the ecological and societal roles of native and naturalised wildlife, especially relationships with domestic livestock.

Dr Ruairidh (Rory) Nevard MANZCVS is a cattle veterinarian and keen deer hunter; currently undertaking a residency in theriogenology at Charles Sturt University.