You never know what you might find in the corner of a shed

At work recently, I was talking to a manager from another department about fisheries-related matters and the conversation got round to deer, as it always does (he had noticed the nice wee set of 12-inch hog deer antlers I have on my desk). Jim told me that in the 70s he had been a ranger out at Cobourg National Park. We chatted about the park as I was lucky enough to work there for six weeks in 1995 as part of an initiative to broaden rangers' experience while working for Parks Victoria.

We naturally talked about the sambar and banteng in the area, but what really tweaked my interest was that he told me he was there at the time and knew the traditional owner who shot the last known barasingha on the peninsula in 1974. Unfortunately, no photographs were taken and the hunter has since gone to the Dream Time; man, it would have been good to talk to him. Jim said the barasingha just held on in low numbers for over 60 years until that last one was seen and shot.

If you read Arthur Bentley’s book An introduction to the deer of Australia you will learn five barasingha were purchased in 1912 from the Victorian Acclimatisation Society along with 54 fallow deer and three sambar. En-route, one barasingha jumped overboard off Cape York and the remaining deer including the four barasingha were off-loaded into a stockade at Port Essington and were eventually released into the surrounding bush.

There were probably a few factors that made it tough for the barasingha to really establish. The low number originally liberated, competition from banteng that are also browsers as well as grazers, but probably most importantly, barasingha are a floodplain animal. The area they were released into is savannah woodland. Unfortunately, they were just 50 or 60 kilometres as the crow flies from some good floodplains areas, but their numbers never got to the stage where they expanded their range to get to the Murganella floodplains. But who knows, there might still be a few still out there on Cobourg.

Barasingha in Victoria?

As mentioned above, the barasingha that were released on Cobourg Peninsula were purchased from the Victorian Acclimatisation Society. There are a few records of attempted releases in Victoria and a few lost during transport in Victoria and en-route to more northern destinations. I found a couple of references to barasingha in Victoria in a newspaper and old hunting magazines when I was undertaking literature searches for my Honours program in 1995. The hunting mag referred to a hind that was shot behind Healesville that the author believed to be a barasingha due to its colour and different stature to sambar, but unfortunately again no photo was taken. The newspaper reference referred to barasingha and elk being seen by dam construction workers on picnics in the Upper Yarra River when the dam was being built in the 1950s.

Fifteen years after reading the newspaper reference, I was picking up some deer carcases for a deer hunting workshop in southern NSW. The deer farmer bred fallow deer including the Persian (Mesopotamian) sub-species and I had picked up a nice cast antler from a buck in the paddock where we had got the deer. The farmer kindly offered that I could keep it and said he thought the other antler was in the shed near the house and I could have it too if I wanted (of course I ‘wanted’).

When we went into the shed we found the antler, but what really pricked my interest was a set of antlers mounted on a wooden shield. I asked if I could get them out from underneath a pile of cast fallow antlers. I inquired where they came from and he stated that he had picked them up at a clearing auction at the end of the construction of the Snowy River Scheme. The antlers had been on the wall of a hotel that had been moved to the Snowy Scheme from the Upper Yarra Dam.

The farmer thought they were from a barasingha. He did not know if it was actually taken in the Upper Yarra, but I thought it was an interesting coincidence with what I had read in the newspaper. When I got home after the deer workshop I did a bit of online research and the antlers look more like Eld’s deer (have a look at the photos attached to this article and then go online and look at barasingha and Eld’s deer heads and decide for yourself). If this is an Eld’s deer and it was taken in the Upper Yarra, it is an interesting addition to the history of deer in Australia, as well as this species which is now listed as endangered in its natural range in Asia.

If you do find any photos or interesting heads, let us know at the ADA. It might be a new record of a species that is not currently known to have been in Australia. Who knows, there might still be the odd little pocket of ‘interesting’ deer out there hanging on that no-one has really noticed or cared about; remember, Australia is a big place.