It is a question that I get a lot. "Hey what's with the deer?"
The picture is of a Sika Deer from Nara, Japan. There is no reason for the picture.
YouTube asked for a channel profile picture and I picked something cute from my latest trip abroad.
I have visited Nara several times and enjoyed it there. But I found
the existing documentation on the deer rather lacking.
I figure since I have the deer on my channel that I should do a video about it.
In this video, we are going to look at the Sika Deer of Nara Park and briefly, in Taiwan as well.
The Sika deer is most famous for living in Japan, but it is also present across East Asia.
From Vietnam to China to Russia in the north, the Sika deer's range spreads far and wide.
Before the waters rose, it is theorized that the lands beneath what is now the
South China and Japanese seas used to have deer too. But after the ice ages, the waters
and mountains rose and certain populations found themselves isolated on Japan and Taiwan.
Sika in Japanese means deer, so the English name Sika deer literally means "deer deer".
In Chinese it is called "梅花鹿", the plum flower deer. Named after the beautiful
white spots on its summer coat. I will refer to it as the sika deer throughout this video.
Like its relatives in North America, the sika deer thrives in a mix of forests and other habitats.
They are non-migratory, are not well suited to the winter,
and like to eat evergreen broad-leaved plants. Their main natural predators are bears and wolves.
Human-deer interactions in East Asia vary by the country. In China and Vietnam,
their wild populations have been basically hunted to nothing. In Russia and Japan, they are still
quite common. Japan, especially so. They are overabundant to the point of being a pest.
Nara City is the capital city of Japan's Nara prefecture. It borders Kyoto and had
been the capital of Japan for 80 years from 710 to 794 when the Emperor lived there.
Nara the city is pretty interesting but the Park is the big tourist attraction.
About 2 million tourists a year come to see the big temples
and feed the thousand or so deer living there. Unlike with other populations of
sika deer, these deer are used to humans and left essentially to free-range.
The Nara deer are considered sacred, a tradition that dates back to 1006.
11th century documents and paintings now in the Nara National Museum
show a god from the Kashima shrine riding a white spotted deer to the nearby Mt. Kasuga.
By the 13th century, the killing of a Nara deer was equated to the killing of a priest.
They were protected from harm by the Kofuku-ji Temple, once one of the Seven Great Temples.
In 1602, Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Shogun of Edo-era Japan,
continued this tradition and punished those who killed the deer.
Without any existing natural predators or culling by humans, the deer population grew fast.
The exploding population became a problem for the local Nara people
because the deer are immensely damaging to crops and plant life.
And as any Nara Park visitor knows, they can get super aggressive towards people.
70 years later, the Japanese government found that they had to do something about the deer.
Too many locals were complaining. So they began ceremoniously sawing off their antlers
to keep them from destroying lanterns and to reduce injuries to people. This is still
being done and explains why many of the deer in Nara you see today have stumpy antlers.
In 1880, Nara Park was established. It was the time of modernization in Japan.
Old traditions were abandoned, seen as just superstitions. The deer lost their special
place and were penned up in the park, where overcrowding and poaching began taking a toll.
By the end of World War II, there were just 79 deer left in Nara Park, the result of neglect
and declining resources. The Government declared them a national treasure in 1957 and since then
the Foundation for the Protection of Deer in Nara Park has been managing the population:
Moving pregnant females in preparation for birth. Cutting their antlers. And
moving problem deer away from private property into the park.
## The Nara Deer Today
There are about 1000-1500 deer in Nara Park - a very dense population for a small
6 square kilometer area. Despite the amount of rice crackers they steal from tourists,
their primary diet comes from grazing on the grasses and plants in the park.
They are also known to steal bamboo from temples and religious festivals.
The density of the population makes their lives hard. Studies of their bone marrow
found that most of the Nara park deer are extremely skinny. There is simply not enough
food to eat for them to get fat and were it not for humans many of them would probably starve.
Adjacent to Nara Park are the primeval forests of Mt Kasuga. Logging and hunting are forbidden here,
but the deer are known to migrate into the forests to eat. Their grazing has affected the forestry
and has given the advantage to certain taller trees and plants that the deer do not like to eat.
There have been proposals to fence off the forests from the deer, but this has not been
really pursued because it would cause the deer to go elsewhere (i.e. private property) for food.
The sheer amount of deer and their search for food has caused them to be hit by cars and
trains in the area. Various reflectors and fencing measures have been implemented to deal with this,
but you still get around 5-10 deer-train collisions a month during the peak migratory
seasons around January. Many more are hit by cars during periods of low visibility.
It has been over 3 years since I have last been to Japan. I loved my time there. Walking across the
city to get to the park. Checking out the temples and standing in line to see what is inside.
All of that was fun. But the most memorable parts of my time there involved the deer of Nara.
I don’t think anyone visiting Japan for the first time should pass up seeing the deer.
They will be the highlight of any trip.
Since I live in Taiwan, I feel that it is necessary to leave Nara and tell you a bit
about the Formosan Sika Deer. Having reached Taiwan over 40,000 years ago with a land bridge,
they quickly established themselves all across the island.
The Taiwanese aboriginal people hunted the Formosan sika deer for their meat and skins.
Since there were not that many people around, the Sika populations remained high.
But in the 1600s, the Dutch came to Taiwan and established a settlement.
They hunted the deer and devastated its population, basically removing it from all
of its lands. 110,000 skins a year were being exported to Japan back then. The Japanese came
afterwards and ruthlessly exploited them as well. The last wild Formosan Sika Deer was shot in 1969.
But even though they were extinct in the wild,
the deer bred well in captivity and two captive populations remained in Taiwan.
The first was in the Taipei Zoo. The second was on Green Island, brought there at the
start of the century for breeding and then released in the wild after the 80s.
It was decided to reintroduce the Sika deer to the Kenting National Park in 1984. This group
of Sika deer grew well and today the population is about a thousand-strong. If you’re in Taipei,
definitely consider going to see the Sika deer of Taiwan roaming their enclosures and eating.