Water Deer Behaviour - A Preface

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Studying animal behaviour is a complex and challenging process. It's hard to observe enough of a species to know how common a particular behaviour is among individuals, or to watch an individual for long enough to document more than a subset of their behaviour. Moreover, there's always an element of guesswork, because we can never put ourselves entirely in the mind of the animal we're studying to understand the true motivation behind a behaviour. As scientists and dispassionate observers, we do our best not to anthropomorphize our subjects, to put a human spin on what we've just witnessed and try to explain it as if it were us doing it, but anyone with experience working or living with animals will know that the more we watch, the more we recognise much the same individuality we acknowledge in humans. Growing up, we saw that no two dogs or cats ever had the exact same personality, even if they were littermates. I think Catherine Raven summed the situation up well in her 2021 book, The Fox and I, writing:

One water deer doe licks the face of another, presumably related, female at Whipsnade Zoo, while a buck grazes in the background. Much of the data on the behaviour of water deer behaviour has come from studies at Whipsnade Zoo and Woburn Abbey where the deer are captive, but free to range over several hundred or thousand acres. - Credit: Marc Baldwin

"We draw minute distinctions between individual people - the way they look and how they act. When it comes to nonhuman animals, we tend to generalize because too often they all look, sound, and act alike to us. We're just not very empathetic toward wild animals. I've a notion it's because we think we're evolutionarily advanced and more intelligent than they are. Arrogance dissolves empathy."

I raise the forgoing without mawkish intent, but instead to underline that ethology, or the study of animal behaviour, is a particularly tentative science. Coupled with this, water deer are a small and frequently elusive deer, meaning that both their biology and behaviour have been studied less than that of many other cervids. As such, this section serves primarily to describe the behaviours we recognise in this species, without significant focus on the intention behind it. It is also important to recognise that there is likely to be individual, and probably seasonal/age, variation in these behaviours. Indeed, those with experience keeping water deer in captivity have observed evident personalities. In Deer, for example, Raymond Chaplin noted how distinct behaviours were noticeable among the fawns of his two captive water deer does within the first couple of days of life; some sleeping a lot, while others were keen to explore. At Whipsnade, Stefan Stadler noted a change in "shyness" during the year:

"Interestingly enough, in both sexes, the degree of shyness toward human disturbance was greater between May and October than between November and April."

This perhaps reflects cooler temperatures and poorer grazing making flight a more costly option.

The behavioural sections of this article draw heavily from Stadler's Ph.D. thesis, in which he described 56 behavioural patterns; 39 (70%) of which occurred during social interactions and 19 during agonistic encounters. Additionally, I have added my observations of both wild and free-range captive (i.e., at Whipsnade and Woburn Abbey Deer Park, where the animals have free access to estates of approximately 2.5 sq-km/600 acres and 8 sq-km/2,000 acres, respectively) individuals, and have generally erred on the side of caution and tried to avoid interpreting anything through a lens of unjustifiable anthropomorphism.