This article presents an argument for the use of anthropological-style fieldwork as a method in animal history. Acknowledging the difficulties of accessing the animal past, it proposes that fieldwork can be used both to generate more zoocentric research questions and to interpret sources in ways that complement or go beyond established scientific explanations of animal actions. The potential of the method is demonstrated through the exploration of a specific empirical question, about how red deer (Cervus elaphus) herds in the Scottish Highlands were affected by the 20th-century boom in plantation forestry. Tracking 1950s deer movements across a cluster of hunting estates in the Angus Glens, the article uses fieldwork observations to suggest a new theory of what might have put red deer populations on the move at different times in history, positing a deer-social, rather than wholly environmental, cause. In so doing, it presents new possibilities for animal-centric histories.

The question of how we can know or access animals in the past has long troubled animal historians. The shape of their agency (as it emerges in concert with the landscape assemblages of which they are part) can be inscrutable to us in the present, let alone through the murky, refractive waters of the archive.1 If animal historians are to go beyond histories of how different human societies felt about or used animals into understanding the “parallel realities” of animal pasts, as Susan Nance has put it, we need ways of knowing animals.2 If we are to follow animal traces through human-authored archives, reading texts or images as human-animal collaborations, we need methods for distinguishing their tracks.3 One such method, also used by Nance, is to draw on the animal sciences, particularly ethology, to recognize animal ways of being (though without falling into biological determinism).4 This article suggests another: anthropology-style, ethnographic (or “ethographic”) fieldwork.5 It asks how animal historians can use fieldwork in the present to get to know animals in the past, using a specific empirical question—about how plantation forestry has shaped red deer worlds in the Scottish Highlands—to explore how we can do so.

This article makes two central claims for fieldwork as method in animal history: that it can help to generate more zoocentric, rather than anthropocentric, animal historical research questions, and that it can be used to interpret archival sources in a way that opens up explanations of animal actions beyond what has been (or can be) studied scientifically. I make some claim to originality with this approach to researching animal histories, though, of course, other scholars have gone ahead of me, and it is their work I turn to explore next. Furthermore, as I will argue, something akin to a fieldwork method is more deeply rooted in animal history than one might, at first, suppose—something that turns the methodological movement I am proposing into more of a logical next stepping-stone, than a leap into “uncharted water.”6

“Fieldwork” is a broad methodological category. In this article, I focus on how animal historians might draw on the fieldwork methods of multispecies anthropologists, field philosophers, and geographers who are working, like animal historians, on exploring social worlds as “multispecies achievements.”7 While these scholars might use fieldwork to answer different questions than those posed by historians, their orientation toward more-than-human agencies makes their methods particularly useful for animal historians. Ethnographic methods are quite varied, but they paradigmatically involve spending significant amounts of time conducting participant observation—in this case, with animals and the people who know them well (for example, hunters and their quarry, or herders and their herds).8 This method has produced an upswell of important work in multispecies anthropology, which has been influential (alongside and drawing from indigenous studies and scholars) in promoting a relational view of life across animal studies.9 Anthropologist Laura McLauchlan has suggested that ethnographic methods might have much to offer animal historians, particularly in helping historians become responsive or attuned to the animals they are studying.10

Several historical geographers have used similar fieldwork methods, in combination with archives, to explore animal worlds. Hayden Lorimer, for example, has drawn on archival documents and walked traditional routes to explore geographies of the Cairngorms reindeer herd, while Eugenie van Heijgen, Clemens Driessen, and Esther Turnhout have used participant observation, interviews, and archival materials to explore duck decoys as multispecies landscapes.11 In this article, drawing on these anthropological and geographical methodological precedents, I explore how to use fieldwork and archives together to answer questions of a particularly historical orientation—not to explore history as “background” to how a landscape or human-animal relationship came to be the way it is today, but to enter into lively animal pasts because they are interesting in and of themselves. In other words, this article looks at how fieldwork data can become legible as a kind of historical evidence. It answers Etienne Benson’s call for a widening of the primary sources from which we write animal histories, suggesting that the experiences gathered during fieldwork with animals can act as a kind of source in themselves.12

More than any other animal historian, it is Sandra Swart who is notable for her forays into using ethnographic methods to write history. In Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South Africa (2010), she describes using fieldwork in two ways.13 The first is more methodologically mainstream in history: already a keen equestrian, she saddles up to meet horse people, sometimes in remote and otherwise inaccessible areas, and gathers oral histories from them.14 Her second use for fieldwork is new, experimental, and loosely formed. She writes of using her experience with horses, her long love and companionship with them, as a kind of evidence—of how the “physicality of fieldwork,” “touching horses, watching them move, watching them being ridden, watching them eat,” shapes how she understands the horses of the past.15 Swart is not explicit about how exactly it does so in this book, but in a more recent piece, she tackles the subject head-on.16 She describes an experimental method of “embedded history,” conducting riding fieldwork among Mongolian horses and horsemen in order to explore horse bodies—and their ways of interacting with their human riders—as a living, “ephemeral archive” of a historical human-animal relationship.17 For example, the gaits of horses and the position they encourage her to take on the saddle, in contrast to her usual style, are a kind of archive of the particular uses to which Mongolian horses have been put—namely, herding. Swart proposes that riding itself can be a method, if it provides access to this very living archive.

While animal historians have turned to the body as an important site of analysis (as have animal geographers), Swart notes that “none have (yet) looked at (let alone argued for performing) the physical interactions of humans and horses…as my study does, albeit tentatively.”18 Building on Swart’s work, this article presents a complementary case for fieldwork in animal history—one that explores contemporary animal bodies, behaviors, and interactions with landscapes as living archives of past worlds. It seeks to explore “the world as fleshly text,” as “an embodied collection of interdependent traces” of past lives.19 It is through “performing” the interactions of humans and deer in the Scottish Highlands via participant observation in a local form of hunting—“deer stalking”—that I access this ephemeral archive.20

While fieldwork methods might seem, at first, to be a difficult fit with history, animal historians have long been working with the idea that intimate, personal knowledge of a kind of animal in the present can be used to interpret historical sources about that animal in the past. In her much-cited 2013 article “Milking Other Men’s Beasts,” Erica Fudge draws on the (scientific) fieldwork of Temple Grandin, an animal behaviorist, to suggest a reason as to why milking another person’s cow was considered to be a different crime than milk theft in 17th-century Essex—namely, because it would have been likely to greatly disturb the animal.21 Fudge describes Grandin as a guide to “other worlds,” someone who through long engagement and empathy with cows can provide some insight into what it is like to be a cow, as well as what matters to cows.22 This is not to claim that contemporary cows are the same as those living in very different circumstances in the 1600s (historicizing animals is, after all, a core task of the animal historian), but that there are enough similarities to merit using cows now to interpret sources about cows then. There is something in the notion that people who are close to animals can act as (always imperfect) guides to their worlds, opening up the kind of animal history that goes beyond what humans thought about animals in the past to explore their “parallel realities.”23 What I am suggesting, along (I think) with Sandra Swart, is that we can be our own Temple Grandins—we can get to know animals and their human-animal-landscape entanglements through fieldwork in the present ourselves, and then use this experience to interpret historical source material.

When it comes to animal histories of domesticated animals like dogs and cats, it is likely that “hidden fieldwork”—close, familial experience with the animal—lies behind many an animal historian’s interpretation of their sources. A pet presence is mainly noticeable through dedications and acknowledgments in their publications. To highlight just a few examples: the acknowledgments section of Chris Pearson’s Dogopolis thanks “all the dogs of friends and family who have walked with me throughout this book: Aengus, Tintin, Toby, and the incomparable Timmy”; Victoria Dickenson’s Rabbit is dedicated to “Thumper, the first of her tribe to share our home” while the acknowledgments section notes the “interspecies affection” and “comfort” provided by her family’s rabbits; Hilda Kean’s The Great Cat and Dog Massacre is dedicated to her three cats, “Sidney Trist, Tommy Atkins, and Albert Chevalier” and their ancestors.24 It is not clear from such acknowledgments how the author’s familiar knowledge of the animal in question shapes the historical analysis in the book. Perhaps some historians would claim it has no influence at all. But when it comes to wild animals like Scotland’s red deer, the details of how I have come to know them cannot be relegated to the background—I cannot thank my pet stag. Wild deer are famously wary of humans, and it is only through borrowing the skills of a hunter that I have been able to get close enough to watch them in “the wild,” outside captive settings like parks and zoos. This article theorizes the contribution of this kind of knowledge explicitly, working through just one example to show the potential (and potential pitfalls) of bringing fieldwork from the fringe and into the center of animal history.

Even if many animal historians are, in some sense, already “in the field” as they share their lives with the domesticated animals they write about, in this article I make the case for fieldwork in the more traditional sense, as a research activity undertaken deliberately, generally outside the home. Ethnographic research, formally done, produces a body of evidence in the form of field notes and recordings that can be drawn upon to make specific points and comparisons in a way that the everyday experience of living with a non-human family member does not. While there are many excellent, more formal autoethnographic explorations of human-animal relations (Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto, for example), always reaching toward the familiar and “home” as research sites puts us in danger of two biases.25 The first is a sense of overfamiliarity—that by fieldworking at home, we overestimate the extent to which we know and understand the animals we are studying. Who, after all, has not been tempted to assign obscure, unprovable, and generally anthropomorphic motives to a pet? The second is a bias toward domesticated animals, already overrepresented in animal histories. This tendency makes sense—these animals have been closest to, and most directly involved in, human histories. But there have been many histories written of dogs, horses, cats, and cattle, and it is perhaps past time to explore what less familiar creatures might tell us (a diversification of interest the founding essay of this journal very much encourages).26

It is my contention that ethnographic fieldwork that involves meeting wild animals in the landscapes in which they dwell has much to offer in helping to redress this balance, while continually reminding the researcher—often footsore, uncomfortable, or in other ways out of their element—of the distances and differences between their experience of the world and that of other animals. This does not mean that as fieldworkers we should always be heading for, or ever problematically exoticizing, “foreign wilds.” A good degree of considered engagement with place is important for avoiding misinterpretation and disrespect. However, to expand our understanding of multispecies history and the multiple forms of life and agency that have been involved in it, animal historians need to head out, notebook firmly in hand, to meet animals where they live.

As previously stated, this article makes two claims for this kind of fieldwork as a method in animal history: that it can be used to generate animal-centric historical research questions, and that it can be used to interpret sources—or used as a kind of primary source in itself. I make the first argument now, moving to the second after my research questions (and my methods for generating them) have been established.

Scotland’s red deer (Cervus elaphus) are an interesting population for animal historians. First, there is their cultural heft: they are Scotland’s most charismatic megafauna, a powerful symbol of the Highlands, a tourist draw, and a bearer of folklore.27 The image of the antlered stag, in particular, is ubiquitous in Scotland, gracing everything from whisky bottles to the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. Furthermore, the love of hunting red deer has been an important force in the shaping of the social, cultural, and political life of the Highlands, especially since the early 19th century.28 My research has focused on what it has meant for the deer themselves to be prized for the field sport of deer stalking—and then, over the last century, progressively less prized as “overgrazers” and destroyers of Scottish mountain landscapes.29 This research has drawn on the wealth of available source material on these deer, from hunters’ archives in particular, as well as on fieldwork experiences with contemporary deer stalkers. Initially, the idea was to use fieldwork in a more conventional sense in history, to collect oral histories, and to draw on multispecies anthropology not for its methods, but for its ontologies of human-animal entanglement and its frameworks regarding the co-creation of landscape assemblages.30 Fieldwork, however, has a way of upending expectations. The experiential richness of following deer and deer stalkers around the mountains prompted ever-growing questions, and my study settled around the evidence I encountered. It wasn’t just the words of deer-people that would constitute my data, but the whole of my multisensory immersion in red deer worlds.31

In the end, my fieldwork took the form of participant observation in deer stalking and with deer scientists (essentially, taking part in their work, asking questions about it, writing and recording notes about our activities, taking photographs, etc.), following and observing deer and deer landscapes on my own, and conducting semi-structured recorded interviews with hunters both amateur and professional.32 Through fieldwork, I came up with the primary questions of my deer research—concerning how red deer experienced a historic change in how people valued their presence in the Highlands, and how it might have shaped their history—as well as the more limited question I focus on here: how Highland red deer worlds were shaped by the spread of industrialized plantation forestry in the early to mid-20th century. I turn now to an ethnographic vignette—the paradigmatic form for rendering fieldwork experience in anthropology—to demonstrate how I came up with this question and, by example, how fieldwork can be used to come up with novel, animal-centered research in animal history.33

                       ***

It is a cold November day in the Scottish Highlands, and I am standing on the side of a mountain, waiting for the sound of a shot. With me is Ozymandias*.34 The other two members of our hunting party are some distance above us, creeping in close to an ever-wary herd of red deer. With the lie of the land and the wind as it is, extra bodies would only get in the way, so we wait. To pass the time while our bog-wetted feet slowly freeze solid, Ozymandias tells me stories: great yarns of stag-stalking seasons past, high mountaintops, daring crawls, doughty deer ponies, and glorious isolation. He paints a romantic picture of Highland deer stalking, but after just a few days of fieldwork, many of my book-fed illusions about the wildness of Scottish deer country are slipping way. Looking down at a glen floor littered with chunky infrastructure—a winding road, huge pylons, an electricity substation, several dark green polygons of forest plantation—I ask Ozymandias if they spoil things for him. He says no. He smiles, says he simply blanks them out, that he does not see them. I laugh, not quite believing what he is saying. Then the smack of the rifle echoing off the mountain above brings us both back down to earth.

                       ***

Although I was amused by Ozymandias’s choice to “not see” elements of the landscape that did not accord with his romantic vision of it, I later realized that I had been doing something similar, to some extent, up to that very afternoon. We’d had a fruitless search for deer in the morning and had driven to a different part of the estate to try again after lunch. The stalker leading us, Hamish*, locked in pursuit of a likely herd, had taken us somewhere I had not thought it possible to go—inside a forestry plantation, a near 200-acre stand of identical-looking, evenly spaced conifers. Until that moment, I, like Ozymandias, had been blanking them out, not counting them as part of the terrain on which deer lived and humans hunted. This might sound silly, but a Scottish forest plantation is not like a forest: the trees are forbiddingly dense, and they are usually surrounded by 6-foot-high wood-and-wire square-meshed deer fencing. They looked closed off, separate, an ill fit with the open landscape, so I ignored them. But then Hamish squeezed us through a section of semi-collapsed fencing into the plantation, and a new world opened up. The atmosphere was strange. The wind died almost immediately, and it was dark, warm, and quiet compared to the open hill. We navigated our way across straight lines of trees that stretched down the mountain before disappearing into the gloom. Tangling myself in the fence line on the way out, I began thinking about how the deer I was there to study interacted with these fences, and these strange, dense patches of monoculture forest. I wanted to know how, why, and when they were planted, and how they shaped deer worlds.

Using fieldwork to generate historical research questions about human-animal relationships is about observing entanglements—using “the arts of noticing” to focus on the local, specific, emplaced relations between multiple forms of life and non-life.35 I have found it to be a valuable method for asking questions about the historical “parallel lives” of particular animal populations. Once such an entanglement has been noticed, the questioning begins: How did this relation (if it existed) function in the period I am interested in? How significant was it to these animals’ lives? What was its place within historical human societies? Of course, using fieldwork as method should not lead to anachronism or a myopic focus on the present. Not all entanglements visible today will extend back to where you wish to investigate. Not all past entanglements will be observable in the present. It may be less useful as a method for ancient or medieval historians than it is for modern historians, as the traces of past entanglements in the “ephemeral archive” of living populations fade over time. These drawbacks are worth bearing in mind. I do not suggest that fieldwork become the only method for generating research questions in animal history—just that it should become one among many.

Scottish deer hunting culture and the sources it has left behind are inclined, like Ozymandias, to the romantic idea of the Highlands as a wilderness, so mentions of human infrastructures like plantation forests are few and far between, their significance downplayed.36 When it comes to deer worlds, however, they have had an outsized importance. Most of the sources I draw upon here come from the Whitehead Collection, the archive of deer hunter and author G. Kenneth Whitehead (1913–2004), held as part of the Archives and Special Collections of Durham University Library.37 He published ten books on deer and hunting over his lifetime, many of which are often cited in both scientific and historical scholarship on deer. The archive is large, containing 230 boxes of papers, but I will focus on one small section of it: his comprehensive survey of Scottish deer “forests” (hunting estates), conducted from 1949 to 1959 and selectively published in 1960 as The Deerstalking Grounds of Great Britain and Ireland.38 Contained within Whitehead’s survey forms and correspondence are unique accounts of the presence of fenced plantations in certain areas, and the ways in which local deer were affected by them—or, at least, the effects that stalkers noticed. I would likely have glossed over this information, if it were not for getting tangled up in that fence.

Plantation forestry in the Scottish uplands started with a trickle, then continued with a flood, in the early 1900s. Turn-of-the-century experiments by landowning forestry pioneers such as John Stirling Maxwell (1866–1956) demonstrated that new techniques could help trees grow on dense, waterlogged Highland soils, and with the aid of the Forestry Commission (established in 1919), the emerging discipline of scientific forestry helped convert the Highlands into a space of conifer production, churning out fast-growing Sitka spruce, Douglas fire, Norway spruce, and Lodgepole pine.39 Areas that were planted were always fenced first, to keep the nibbling mouths of deer and sheep away from vulnerable young trees. Six-foot-high wire fencing, originally designed to keep deer inside deer parks and forests for hunting, was repurposed to keep them out of plantations.40 By the 1950s, large areas of the Highlands had become an “ecotechnical environment,” dedicated to the effective production of timber.41 Over the course of the 20th century, Scotland’s forested area more than tripled in size.42

By zooming in on specific plantations, it is possible to explore the effects that this kind of industrialized afforestation had on red deer at the local level. Here I lay out just one example to demonstrate how fieldwork data can be used to interpret archival sources, or how it can act as a kind of source in itself. My chosen site lies in the Mounth, straddling the Angus Glens, on the southeastern edge of the Highlands (Figure 1). Starting in the late 1940s, within the rush of afforestation projects following World War II, the Forestry Commission began planting several areas across Glen Isla, Glen Prosen, and Glen Clova (see Figure 2 for map). Work on Glenisla Forest (east of Glen Isla proper and straddling the smaller valleys of Glen Finlet, Glen Taitney, and Glenmarkie) began in 1949, with mixed plantings of larch and pine.43 Though the next site was acquired by the Forestry Commission in the 1930s, the majority of the work at Glendoll Forest—northeast of Glenisla Forest, at the head of Glen Clova—started in 1950, with the plantation’s first Forester being appointed that year, and an extensive ploughing and planting season in 1953/54 being documented by archive photographs.44 In between the two is Glenprosen Forest (also called Glenclova), where planting also began in the 1950s.45

Figure 1.

Map showing location of the Mounth, on the southeastern edge of the Scottish Highlands.

Figure 1.

Map showing location of the Mounth, on the southeastern edge of the Scottish Highlands.

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Figure 2.

Map showing positions of Glenisla, Glenprosen, and Glendoll plantations and of Caenlochan deer forest.

Figure 2.

Map showing positions of Glenisla, Glenprosen, and Glendoll plantations and of Caenlochan deer forest.

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To understand how these new forests affected local deer, it is important to look at what they replaced—how the land was being used, and how deer lived there, before the forests were planted. The long historic presence of deer and hunters in the Angus Glens is attested to by local placenames, such as Corrie Fee (from the Scottish Gaelic Coire Fiadh, deer corrie) and Craig/Cairn Damff (Creag/Càrn Damh, stag crag/cairn) by Glendoll Forest, Hunt Hill near Glenprosen Forest, and Glen Damff (stag glen) just east of Glenisla Forest. Red deer may well have been hunted in the area since they migrated to Scotland after the last ice age, but the most relevant regime of land use preceding the plantations was the “deer forest.” Emerging during the Victorian period and layering over hunting landscapes oriented toward more communal “tainchel” hunts, deer forests were privately owned, largely treeless areas of upland Scotland that were managed as game reserves for stalking red deer.46 The deer forest was a particular configuration of human-animal-landscape relations, a space where the activity of deer stalking and the flourishing of deer populations was prioritized above other uses of the land.

The precise contours of this configuration changed over time. From the early 19th century to the 1880s, the management of deer forests was generally hands-off, mainly consisting of the landowner ordering the removal or reduction of disturbances and competitors (i.e., grazing animals and farmers) and giving the deer space, before stalking prize stags and the largest hinds (for meat) in late summer and autumn.47 From the late 19th century onward, management practices like selective shooting developed around the aim of producing bigger and better trophy stags, though they were patchily carried out and did not become mainstream until the mid-twentieth century.48 Key to the deer forest was the local “stalker,” employed by the estate to guide hunters in the mountains and get them close to deer. To facilitate the hunt for visiting sportsmen with a wide range of hunting and shooting abilities, stalkers had to know the land and the habits of the deer living on it like the back of their hand. This was a set of skills and knowledge often passed down from father to son, uncle to nephew, among families local to the deer forest area, and it was stalkers who, from the mid-20th century onward, became managers of deer. This meant counting deer, determining which of them should be shot to “improve” the herd, and working out how to produce as many trophy stags as possible.

The areas planted as Glenisla, Glendoll, and Glenprosen Forests had previously been managed as deer forest. In one late 19th-century guide to the deer forests of Scotland, the area turned into the Glenisla Forest plantation in 1949, for example, was described as a “small but good little forest” that “carries one rifle nicely, whose average kill [in a season] should be 27 stags”; Glen Doll, meanwhile, could “carry two rifles, and 40 stags is the annual kill.”49 We know, then, that there were red deer in these areas, with a long history of living there, and a recent past living under the “deer forest” landscape regime. It is reasonable to expect that they would have been affected by being fenced out of large areas of their territories, and the turning over of deer forest to plantation forest. But how they were affected, and what they did in response, is a complicated matter to trace, and differed across herds and localities.

In this case, we have but a few shreds of contemporaneous evidence from Whitehead’s archived survey of Scotland’s deer forests. He did not set out to collect information about plantation forestry, mainly being interested in woods to which deer had access, and in the question of whether or not any deer forests were still fully enclosed by fencing (a short-lived 19th-century trend).50 Furthermore, he did not survey areas that were no longer functioning as deer forest, which was the case for the Glendoll, Glenprosen, and Glenisla plantations. But the survey return for the deer forest neighboring these planted areas, Caenlochan, when analyzed alongside my fieldwork experiences, can shed some light on what happened to the local deer.51

The original survey form for Caenlochan, filled in and returned to Whitehead in October 1949, provides estimates of the deer population and totals killed each year. These data are augmented by a 1959 update slip Whitehead circulated just before the publication of his book in 1960. The data, provided in Table 1, show that as the new plantations were being created, the size and composition of Caenlochan’s deer population underwent significant change. Between c. 1939 and the end of 1949, the total population reduced from approximately 1,600 to 900 deer and rebalanced toward hinds (females) rather than stags (males). In 1959, the estate was shooting higher numbers of deer overall, but still significantly more hinds than stags. The update slip respondent for Caenlochan specifically attributed the rise in deer being shot on their land to the new plantation forests surrounding it. “The sharp rise in stock killed in Caenlochan,” he wrote, “is due largely to the necessity of keeping down the ever increasing stock. This is attributable to the Forestry Commission fencing in of areas of Glendoll and Glenprosen Forests.”52

Table 1.

Data Collected by G. Kenneth Whitehead on Red Deer at Caenlochan

Pre-1939“Today” (Oct 1949)1959
Red Deer Population (Approximate) 
Stags 1,300 300 No estimate given. 
Hinds 300 600 No estimate given. 
Red Deer Killed Annually 
Stags 100 25 40 
Hinds 30 30 80–100 
Pre-1939“Today” (Oct 1949)1959
Red Deer Population (Approximate) 
Stags 1,300 300 No estimate given. 
Hinds 300 600 No estimate given. 
Red Deer Killed Annually 
Stags 100 25 40 
Hinds 30 30 80–100 

An increased number of deer on neighboring land is what we might most straightforwardly expect from the fencing and planting of a new forest. Displaced deer would have had to go somewhere, and, in this case, Caenlochan was one of the more likely directions (south and east leading to areas of higher human population and infrastructure, of which hunted deer are wary). Furthermore, Caenlochan actually bought 4,450 acres of Glen Doll land in 1950 (the high ground unsuitable for tree planting), which makes it even more likely that the overall “Caenlochan” deer population would increase. But the respondent’s comment about “ever increasing stock”’ masks a more complicated reality. What the estate seems to have been faced with, really, was an ever-increasing female stock. Pre-1939, there were approximately 1,600 deer on the estate—in October 1949, only 900, but significantly rebalanced toward hinds. A lot could have happened in those ten years—the whole change cannot necessarily be attributed to the planting of Glenisla in 1949, at least not without more evidence. But the planting of Glendoll and Glenprosen in the early 1950s brought with it an ongoing influx of hinds (leading Caenlochan to shoot 80–100 of them per year) and only a small increase in the number of stags. This presents a puzzle. Why did so many hinds come to Caenlochan? And why were there proportionally fewer stags?

These questions perplexed me until, when sorting and coding the interviews I conducted with deer stalkers, I came across a snippet of a conversation on another topic that related to this problem. Gavin*, a professional deer stalker, was explaining to me how he managed the herds on the estate he worked for in order to produce as many valuable “trophy” stags as possible. He argued that it was all about keeping control of the number of hinds:

Gavin:

So if you want big antler mass, you want less hinds. If you want better body condition, you want less hinds.

Me:

Because they compete for the same…?

Gavin:

Well, because they’ve got a smaller mouth, and they graze tighter. And not only that, they’re socially dominant. So, he [referring to my male partner who was accompanying me] would tell you the same as me, nobody fights with a woman!

Me:

So the hinds dominate the young stags?

Gavin:

Absolutely. Everything. The big stags too. The main feature on the estate as you come round the corner is a mount…and it’s entirely, it’s a species-rich grassland, entirely dominated by females.

Me:

That’s their nice patch?

Gavin:

The boys are not allowed there.

According to Gavin, it wasn’t just that more hinds meant more competition for limited resources, but that hinds were “socially dominant” over stags, keeping them off the best grazing grounds. If we credit his observations, this suggests a solution to the mystery of what happened to at least some of the resident stags of Caenlochan, and why there came to be so many hinds. When the deer of Glenisla, Glendoll, and Glenprosen were fenced out of their territories from 1949 onward and migrated (at least in part) to Caenlochan, it seems likely that the extra hinds forced out some of the resident stags, displacing them rather than the resident hinds. It is also possible that the original displaced populations would have skewed female. Thinking with Gavin’s description of the hinds on his estate dominating the best grazings, it is possible that the areas chosen for tree planting—more fertile, low-lying, and not too wet—might well have been those held by dominant hind groups, providing the best grazing and shelter during the winter months. The majority of those displaced, then, may well have been female.

It is intriguing to think about what that period of displacement and emigration to new lands might have been like for the deer. Using Gavin’s observation about hind dominance over stags alongside the ecologist Frank Fraser Darling’s understanding of hind-group sociality, informed by his year-long observational study of a herd of deer in the Western Highlands in the 1930s, it is possible to imagine what may have happened.53 Hundreds of hinds were fenced out of their territories and moved, in their tight-knit, multigenerational family groups, to Caenlochan (and likely elsewhere), pushing their way into the space of other resident (and territorial) hind groups. Their place-based knowledge of how to live in their home glens—where to forage, where to shelter, where the worst winds blew, and where to be extra wary of the approach of humans—was rendered useless, and so began the process of learning to survive in a new landscape. Maybe the Caenlochan hinds helped, in their own way, maybe the herds blended, or maybe there were endless skirmishes—kicks, bites, butts, stares, warning stamps, and nostril flares—for the right to good grazing, or the perfect wallow, or the ideal vantage point to keep a watchful eye (or more importantly, nose) over the hills. Either way, in the history of these hind groups, the fencing and planting of Glenisla, Glendoll, and Glenprosen marked significant events, putting populations on the move and bringing deer together who would never have met otherwise.54

Whitehead’s survey doesn’t provide much evidence as to where the area’s displaced stags might have ended up. What remained of the Glenisla estate (after 11,492 acres had been sold to the Forestry Commission) had an atypically high cull of 50 stags in 1950, where before and after it hovered around 20.55 This suggests that a higher number of stags were concentrated on this land after nearby afforestation. Another possibility is that some stags went north into the much larger deer forests of Balmoral, Glen Clunie, or Glencallater. However, Whitehead’s survey returns do not show any contemporaneous increases in stag numbers on any of the estates neighboring Caenlochan.56 Possibly some of them went southward, into the farmlands of Angus and out of the remit of Whitehead’s survey. What seems certain is that the fencing and planting of Glenisla, Glenprosen, and Glendoll Forests caused both a displacement and reshuffling of local red deer populations, with the sex of deer playing an important role in determining who ended up where.

It seems certain, that is, if we credit Gavin’s observations of hind dominance over stags. Some readers might balk at my accepting his theory of hind-stag social interaction without thorough scientific backing; others, at the gendered worldview implicit in the way he spoke, with its echoes of a misogynist caricature of dominant women. They might wonder if his observations of the female deer on the land he managed and his theories about hind-stag interaction said more about his thoughts on human gender relations than the actual behavior of red deer hinds. Though in context he spoke jokingly, in a friendly interview, more with the intention of including my partner in the conversation than making any kind of point about women, his words conjure centuries of Western discourses that projected societal norms about gender relations, families, and sex onto animals.57 For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, for example, many of the upper-class hunters and hunter-naturalists who wrote about Highland red deer assumed that stags were the leaders and “kings” of herds, focusing all their attention on the males and largely ignoring the females, to the detriment of understanding (largely matriarchal) red deer societies.58 There is little evidence, however, that this approach to deer has been shared by professional stalkers like Gavin.59

What characterizes the knowledge of professional stalkers, above all else, is its practicality.60 An experienced stalker knows the deer on his (or more recently, her) patch—how they move, where they’re likely to be, the best ways of approaching them, and the winds and ways that are more likely to result in failure than success. They know where deer like to graze, to wallow, to rut, to calf. They set out every morning of the hunting season with only a pair of binoculars or a telescope to help them spot deer—no maps, no GPS, no drone scouting for likely targets. This is their job, and for many it is a lifelong, even multigenerational, passion. Gavin’s observations are not invalidated by the anthropomorphic way he phrased them—they sit within the realm of his specialist knowledge, the stalker’s magisterium. That does not mean that stalkers know everything there is to know about deer—just that their observations of deer can generally be trusted, especially when they pertain to matters affecting stalking. For Gavin, knowing where on the estate hinds dominated, and observing that they kept his more economically valuable stags off rich grazing grounds, was a practical concern.

After finding the interview snippet from Gavin, I turned to the scientific literature on red deer to see if I could find any studies on the topic—not to judge his observation right or wrong, but with the hope of enriching it. As with evidence from fieldwork, the intention was not to find and use a scientific study on hind domination to straightforwardly explain what happened at Caenlochan (a central claim of the kind of animal history I’m writing here being that animal ways of being and acting in the world can change over time), but more to use science to aid the interpretation of archival evidence—perhaps, for example, to help me spot something else of significance within Whitehead’s survey forms. What I found, however, was that little research had been published on the phenomenon. There were studies on how dominance worked within hind groups and within stag groups, but precious little on the territorial interactions between the two (outside of the well-studied, but brief, mating season or “rut”). This highlights another contribution that anthropological fieldwork with animals, and the people closest to them, can make to animal history: gathering knowledge about animals that has not been, or cannot be, investigated using scientific methods. Thanks in particular to the Isle of Rum Red Deer Project, an ongoing scientific study that began in 1958, Scottish red deer have a claim to being one the best-studied populations of mammals in the world.61 And yet, there are still many aspects of their lives that are not well documented or understood. Observations gathered through ethnographic fieldwork can help animal historians expand their understandings of animal behavior beyond what has been studied scientifically.

This is not, however, merely a matter of using fieldwork observations of deer to fill in the gaps while we wait for science to arrive and prove things to be the case, one way or another. There are forms of knowledge that are not amenable to being proved or disproved by scientific method, and there are questions about animal behavior that are of interest to animal historians and “animal people” like deer stalkers that are not interesting to biologists or ecologists working on the broader questions of their academic disciplines. As one stalker, John*, put it:

Scientists think they know everything about deer but they don’t really. There’s so much more to learn.…For example, I can look at a deer, and I can tell, in maybe ten ways, what it’s thinking by the position of its ears. And sometimes when I’m on the hill, when I used to be on the hill regularly, if I didn’t see them, I could feel them, almost like a water diviner. I could just feel.

None of this knowledge is easily testable through the scientific method, nor (perhaps) of much interest to scientists compared to the excitement this statement would elicit in a multispecies anthropologist. Talking to people who have close and intimate relationships with animals complements the method of using scientific studies to interpret historical source material (as, for example, Susan Nance does by drawing on animal welfare science in her book Entertaining Elephants).62 Fieldwork can lead us to observations and explanations of animal behavior that lie outside what can be, or has been, documented in a narrowly scientific way.

Bearing this in mind, however, it is by bringing the three together—ethnography, ethology, archival methods—that historians can generate the most interesting insights: those that take us beyond the somewhat siloed knowledge of “deer people” (be they scientists or hunters) into new understandings of animal lives. This, as environmental humanities scholar Jeannette Vaught has pointed out, is where multispecies ethnography is at its most interesting—when it is able to add something to our collective understanding of an animal that the people who live and work with that animal could not.63 What historians can add, of course, is an understanding of an animal informed by their histories. At the level of species, population, herd, individual—all have histories that shape their ways of being. The red deer of Caenlochan—their socialities, family trees, territories—all were affected by the planting and fencing of those forests. And this is just one, small, local event in their history. There are many more to investigate, and many additions to be made to our collective understanding of deer (and other animals) via these methods.

Intriguingly, Caenlochan’s deer population went through a similar reversal of the sexes previous to the fencing and planting of Glendoll, Glenisla, and Glenprosen—one seemingly caused, again, by hind territorial dominance over stags, suggesting that this is a phenomenon worthy of further investigation when trying to understand historical deer movements. In his posthumous 1892 book on deer stalking, the hunter, naturalist, and artist Henry Hope Crealock (1831–1891) described Caenlochan as “a beautiful little forest” and a “much-loved resort for the deer” thanks to its “magnificent deep corrie” and the “shelter of woods below.”64 Crealock’s complaint, though, was that the ground was, in essence, too good, meaning that it attracted too many hinds for the preferences of hunters (like the species-rich greens described by Gavin on the estate on which he worked). “As usual with such snug places,” he wrote, “the hinds have got hold of it and swarm there, and in my opinion require a considerable thinning.”65 It seems this “considerable thinning” of hinds—a cull—may well have been carried out, as by the time Whitehead issued his survey to Caenlochan, it was very much a stag forest (with 1,300 stags to 300 hinds). However, it is possible that some other social factor in the wider herd shaped the different use of Caenlochan by hinds and stags over time—something that is not yet understood. John’s words about scientists stand as a reminder for all of us interested in exploring animal worlds: we think we know everything but we don’t really. There’s so much more to learn.

What provokes grazing animals of various species to move into new spaces is a significant historical question—the unexplained relocations of wild herbivores in the past have greatly troubled agricultural societies, provoking, at times, human misery, poverty, and social unrest.66 According animals their agency in history means thinking beyond the standard factors in animal movement narratives (like the availability of food and shelter) to consider the intricacies of their social lives as causes of change.67 As I have shown, bringing methods from history and ethnography together with scientific studies can help us to shed light on these social lives. This approach not only adds to our understanding of deer, but also may help us to advocate for them. As Vaught also pointed out, it is worth asking of our attempts to get to know animals better if there is any benefit for the animal involved: “what’s in it for the horses?,” as she puts it.68 What’s in it for Scotland’s wild deer, in this case, is that a more nuanced understanding of them as social beings with histories might serve to challenge simplistic prevailing narratives about their place in Scottish nature. Seen as overgrazers responsible for habitat destruction, they are being culled in large numbers for rewilding and carbon sequestration projects that involve growing trees.69 This “sacrifice” logic, in which the killing of large numbers of deer is seen as morally neutral if there is a large enough benefit to humans, might be more difficult to maintain if deer were seen more as unique individuals and family groups than as an easily quantifiable mass of grazing mouths.70 Better understandings of how deer move and forage may also help us to devise ways of managing human-deer conflict in non-lethal, or at least more selectively lethal, ways. Beyond deer, however, fieldwork offers a potential advantage for all of the species and populations anthropologists and historians study, for it unavoidably entangles the fieldworker in current animal lives and concerns. It is no great secret that many of us study animals because we love them.71 Engaging with animals through fieldwork may help us to advocate for them more successfully, by gaining an understanding of the contemporary environmental issues and social conflicts in which they are enmeshed.

Through this case study of a few plantation forests and the herds of deer they affected, I have shown how anthropological-style fieldwork can be used both to generate historical research questions about animal lives and to interpret the archival evidence we can find to document them. When we are unsure about what mattered to animals in the past, what affected them, what was significant to their lives, fieldwork can help us ask new questions: we can interact with animals, their environments, and the people who know them best in the present in order to get an idea of what might have been important to their “parallel lives” in the period we are interested in. (Or, indeed, let the encounter with animals lead by allowing what and whom we meet in the field determine the timespan of our interests.) Where extant scientific literature leaves us stumped, or fails to engage with local and embodied knowledge, fieldwork can suggest theories; where archival data is fragmented or light on details, fieldwork can propose explanations.

It is questionable whether or not observing a phenomenon like hind territorial dominance over stags in the present can conclusively prove that that’s what happened in the past, especially in the absence of more detailed archive evidence than that provided by Whitehead’s surveys. Evidence from fieldwork can add to the likelihood of a historical argument being correct, but it cannot act as conclusive evidence on its own. As a historian interested in defending the claim that many kinds of animals have histories—that their actions are not entirely determined by evolutionary drives, and that their ways of life can change in historic time—I do not think observations of animals today can be straightforwardly cast backward in time to argue something like “that’s what must have happened, because that’s how X animal always behaves.” We must allow space for alternative explanations and the possibility that historic animals simply did something different, acting within a complicated assemblage of factors that are (as of yet) obscure to us today. However, if fieldwork observations and archival evidence can be brought together, as I have shown in this article, fieldwork data can lend weight to some explanations over others.

The difficulty of accessing animal pasts has been one of the defining problems of animal history.72 As Erica Fudge wrote in 2002, animals are “inarticulate”—they do not themselves leave written documents, upon which historians typically rely. They do not speak oral histories.73 Their bones are for archaeologists to interpret. Without evidence direct from the horse’s mouth, the history of animals, wrote Fudge, was in some sense “impossible”—what historians were writing was merely “the history of human attitudes towards animals.”74 This position has been refused by multiple animal historians since (including Fudge), who have worked on methods for getting closer to “real historical animals.”75 Fieldwork can be one such method. While it is true that animals do not, themselves, leave written testimonies about their lives for historians to interpret, it is not true that they are therefore inarticulate.76 Animals—especially those closest to us—communicate with humans all the time, in subtle and complex ways, “learning to be affected” by the other.77 Humans also learn to “read” animals: think of John, interpreting a red deer hind’s thoughts through the flickering of her ears. “The field”—animal existence in the here and now, embedded in relationships with humans, environments, and landscape assemblages—is a matrix in which animals can be articulate, can make themselves heard by humans who are paying attention. It is a space in which we can learn to listen, to be affected, to go beyond our “attitudes” about animals and meet them on their own turf. The field can never replace the archive for investigating animal pasts—it exists, after all, in the present, however tangled that present is with the past—but it can enrich our approach to those fragments of evidence about past animal “parallel realities” that are preserved in the archive.

In 1989, environmental historian Donald Worster suggested that “it is time [historians] bought a good set of walking shoes, and we cannot avoid getting some mud on them.”78 He meant this metaphorically—his point was that environmental histories should be part of mainstream historical concern. I suggest we take it more literally: that we walk, ride, wheel, swim, dive, glide our way to wherever animals are, and meet them there.

Published online: December 24, 2024

1.

Vinciane Despret, “From Secret Agents to Interagency,” History and Theory 52, no. 4 (2013): 29–44; Anna Tsing, “The Buck, the Bull, and the Dream of the Stag: Some Unexpected Weeds of the Anthropocene,” Suomen Antropologi 42, no. 1 (2017): 3–21.

2.

Albert G. Way et al., “Roundtable: Animal History in a Time of Crisis,” Agricultural History 94, no. 3 (2020): 448.

3.

Etienne Benson, “Animal Writes: Historiography, Disciplinarity, and the Animal Trace,” in Making Animal Meaning, ed. Linda Kalof and Georgina M. Montgomery (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), 3–16.

4.

Similarly, Éric Baratay has drawn on ethological studies of a giraffe carried out on her journey through France in 1826–27 to write this history from the giraffe’s standpoint. Éric Baratay, “The Giraffe’s Journey in France (1826–1827): Entering Another World,” in Animal History in the Modern City: Exploring Liminality, ed. Clemens Wischermann, Aline Steinbrecher, and Philip Howell (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 91–104; Susan Nance, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Joshua Specht, “Animal History After Its Triumph: Unexpected Animals, Evolutionary Approaches, and the Animal Lens,” History Compass 14, no. 7 (2016): 326–336.

5.

Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose, “Lively Ethography: Storying Animist Worlds,” Environmental Humanities 8, no. 1 (2016): 77–94.

6.

Sandra Swart, “Kicking over the Traces? Freeing the Animal from the Archive,” in Traces of the Animal Past: Methodological Challenges in Animal History, ed. Jennifer Bonnell and Sean Kheraj (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2022), 19–48.

7.

Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose, “Storied-Places in a Multispecies City,” Humanimalia 3, no. 2 (2012): 1.

8.

For a summary of the field methods of multispecies ethnographers, see Laura McLauchlan, “Multispecies Ethnography,” in Handbook of Historical Animal Studies, ed. Mieke Roscher, André Krebber, and Brett Mizelle (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021), 393–408. For a range of examples, see Tsing, “The Buck, the Bull, and the Dream of the Stag”; Paul G. Keil, “Rank Atmospheres: The More-than-Human Scentspace and Aesthetic of a Pigdogging Hunt,” Australian Journal of Anthropology 32, no. S1 (2021): 96–113; Natalie Forssman and Meredith Root-Bernstein, “Landscapes of Anticipation of the Other: Ethno-Ethology in a Deer Hunting Landscape,” Journal of Ethnobiology 38, no. 1 (2018): 71–87; Natasha Fijn, Living with Herds: Human-Animal Coexistence in Mongolia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

9.

McLauchlan, “Multispecies Ethnography”; Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (2016): 4–22.

10.

McLauchlan, “Multispecies Ethnography.”

11.

Hayden Lorimer, “Herding Memories of Humans and Animals,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, no. 4 (2006): 497–518; Eugenie van Heijgen, Clemens Driessen, and Esther Turnhout, “The landscape is a trap: Duck decoys as multispecies atmospheres of deception and betrayal,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 49, e12629 (2024).

12.

Benson, “Animal Writes.”

13.

Sandra Swart, Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010).

14.

The methodological pedigree of fieldwork in oral history is well established. See Arthur A. Hansen et al. (Eds.), “Fieldwork in Oral History” [Special Issue], The Oral History Review 15, no. 1 (1987).

15.

Swart, Riding High, 17.

16.

Swart, “Kicking over the Traces?”

17.

Swart, “Kicking over the Traces?,” 28.

18.

Jamie Lorimer and Sarah Whatmore, “After the ‘King of Beasts’: Samuel Baker and the Embodied Historical Geographies of Elephant Hunting in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ceylon,” Journal of Historical Geography 35, no. 4 (2009): 668–689; Swart, “Kicking over the Traces?,” 30–31.

19.

Benson, “Animal Writes,” 8.

20.

“Stalking” is the primary method by which deer are hunted in the Scottish Highlands and has been since the early 19th century. It involves sneaking up on the deer and then shooting them, usually unaware, from a distance of around 100–200 m. The word “hunting” can refer specifically to hunting deer on horseback, with a pack of hounds, or more generally to any form of tracking and killing a wild animal for sport or food. It is in the latter sense I use it throughout this article. See G. Kenneth Whitehead, Hunting and Stalking Deer in Britain Through the Ages (London: Batsford, 1980).

21.

Erica Fudge, “Milking Other Men’s Beasts,” History and Theory 52, no. 4 (2013): 13–28.

22.

Fudge, “Milking Other Men’s Beasts,” 18.

23.

Way et al., “Roundtable: Animal History in a Time of Crisis,” 448.

24.

Chris Pearson, Dogopolis: How Dogs and Humans Made Modern New York, London, and Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 185; Victoria Dickenson, Rabbit (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 4, 209; Hilda Kean, The Great Cat and Dog Massacre: The Real Story of World War Two’s Unknown Tragedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 6.

25.

Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).

26.

Dan Vandersommers, Thomas Aiello, and Susan Nance, “Animal History: A Brief Introduction to Its Past and Future,” Animal History: 1–8.

27.

John Fletcher, Deer (London: Reaktion Books, 2014); Andrew Wiseman, “Chasing the Deer: Hunting Iconography, Literature and Tradition of the Scottish Highlands” (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009).

28.

Willie Orr, Deer Forests, Landlords and Crofters: The Western Highlands in Victorian and Edwardian Times (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1982); Duff Hart-Davis, Monarchs of the Glen: A History of Deer-Stalking in the Scottish Highlands (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978); Maureen M. Martin, The Mighty Scot: Nation, Gender, and the Nineteenth-Century Mystique of Scottish Masculinity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009); Hayden Lorimer, “Guns, Game and the Grandee: The Cultural Politics of Deerstalking in the Scottish Highlands,” Ecumene 7, no. 4 (1 October 2000): 403–431.

29.

Holly Marriott Webb, “A Red Deer History of the Scottish Highlands, c. 1850–2020” (PhD diss., Aarhus University, 2023).

30.

Laura Ogden, Bill Hall, and Kimiko Tanita, “Animals, Plants, People, and Things: A Review of Multispecies Ethnography,” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4, no. 1: 5–24; Tsing, “The Buck, the Bull, and the Dream of the Stag”; Tsing, Andrew S. Mathews, and Nils Bubandt, “Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 60, no. S20 (1 August 2019): S186–197.

31.

Marriott Webb, “A Red Deer History.”

32.

Kathleen Musante, “Participant Observation,” in Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, 2nd ed., ed. H. Russell Bernard and Clarence C. Gravlee (Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 251–292; H. Brinkmann, “Unstructured and Semistructured Interviewing,” in The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd ed., ed. Patricia Leavy (Oxford: Oxford Academic, 2020), 424–456.

33.

Anna Bloom-Christen and Hendrikje Grunow, “What’s (in) a Vignette? History, Functions, and Development of an Elusive Ethnographic Sub-Genre,” Ethnos (2022): 1–19.

34.

All names of fieldwork informants have been changed. Ozymandias took me up on my (potentially naïve) offer to choose his own pseudonym.

35.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Nils Bubandt, Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen, and Rachel Cypher, eds., Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene: Doing Fieldwork in Multispecies Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).

36.

Martin, The Mighty Scot. See Chapter 2, “Stags and Sassenachs: Stalking Manhood in the Highland Deer Forest.”

37.

Durham University Library, “Catalogue of the Kenneth Whitehead Papers,” n.d. https://n2t.durham.ac.uk/ark:/32150/s1s7526c45x.xml

38.

G. Kenneth Whitehead, The Deerstalking Grounds of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Hollis & Carter, 1960); Papers on deer and deer forests, WHI/7/279–291, Whitehead Collection, Durham University Archives and Special Collections, Palace Green Library, Durham, UK.

39.

Jan Oosthoek, Conquering the Highlands: A History of the Afforestation of the Scottish Uplands (Canberra: ANU Press, 2013).

40.

Marriott Webb, “A Red Deer History.”

41.

Oosthoek, Conquering the Highlands, 2.

42.

A. S. Mather, “Forest Transition Theory and the Reforesting of Scotland,” Scottish Geographical Journal 120, nos. 1–2 (1 January 2004): 83–98.

43.

Rob Cooper, “Glen Isla Land Management Plan,” Forestry and Land Scotland, January 2023, https://forestryandland.gov.scot/what-we-do/planning/consultations/glenisla-lmp

44.

“Staff Lists by Conservancies,” Journal of the Forestry Commission no. 21 (1950): 169–190; Cairngorms National Park Authority, “Site Research Report 19: Glendoll Lodge,” CNP Historic Designed Landscapes Project, May 2013, https://cairngorms.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/19-Glendoll-rpt-H.pdf; Photograph titled “Ploughing Glendoll” by Norman Davidson, 1954, Picture No. 1313, Forestry Memories Image Library, University of the Highlands and Islands Centre for History, Dornoch, Scotland, UK; Photograph titled “Glendoll Forest Drains for 1953/54 Planting” by Norman Davidson, 1954, Picture No. 1314, Forestry Memories Image Library.

45.

D. Halliday, “Glen Prosen Forest Design Plan,” Forestry and Land Scotland, February 2013, https://forestryandland.gov.scot/what-we-do/planning/active/glen-prosen-fdp

46.

A tainchel hunt involved large numbers of men acting as beaters to drive deer from a wide area into a built or natural corral for more high-status hunters to kill at short range. Orr, Deer Forests, Landlords, and Crofters; Wiseman, “Chasing the Deer.”

47.

Marriott Webb, “A Red Deer History.”

48.

Marriott Webb, “A Red Deer History.”

49.

Augustus Grimble, The Deer Forests of Scotland (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1896), 75–76.

50.

Marriott Webb, “A Red Deer History.”

51.

Caenlochan, Papers on deer and deer forests – Aberdeenshire and Angus, WHI/7/279.

52.

Update slip for Caenlochan, WHI/7/279.

53.

Frank Fraser Darling, A Herd of Red Deer: A Study in Animal Behaviour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937).

54.

Red deer in Scotland are generally territorial and do not migrate like other species of ungulate. Their seasonal movements take them up or down their hills, but not far; stags sometimes walk long distances in search of hinds during the autumn rut. Fraser Darling, A Herd of Red Deer.

55.

Whitehead, The Deerstalking Grounds of Great Britain and Ireland, 18.

56.

Survey returns for Glenshee, Rhiedorrach, Perthshire G–Z, WHI/7/287; Bachnagairn (under Balmoral), Glencallater, Glencally, Glen Clunie, Aberdeenshire and Angus, WHI/7/279.

57.

Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York and London: Routledge, 1989).

58.

Fraser Darling, A Herd of Red Deer.

59.

For example, the famous Gaelic poem Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain, written by 18th-century stalker Duncan Bàn MacIntyre, pays close attention to the movement and behavior of hinds. Stalker Alexander Macrae’s 1880 Handbook of Deer-Stalking devotes a chapter to hind stalking, which details how to distinguish pregnant from non-pregnant hinds, and young from old, including closely observed details of body type and behavior. See Marriott Webb, “A Red Deer History”; Garry Mackenzie, Ben Dorain: A Conversation with a Mountain (Belfast: Irish Pages Press/Cló an Mhíl Bhuí, 2021); Alexander Macrae, A Handbook of Deer-Stalking (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1880), 66–68.

60.

Marriott Webb, “A Red Deer History.”

61.

T. H. Clutton-Brock, F. E. Guinness, and S. D. Albon, Red Deer: Behavior and Ecology of Two Sexes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982).

62.

Nance, Entertaining Elephants.

63.

Jeannette Vaught, “Recentring the Animal in Multispecies Ethnography: Review of John Hartigan, Jr., Shaving the Beasts: Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain,” Humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 341–356.

64.

Henry Hope Crealock, Deer-Stalking in the Highlands of Scotland (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1892), 169.

65.

Crealock, Deer-Stalking in the Highlands of Scotland, 169.

66.

Sara E. Morrison, “Bambi in Sherwood Forest and the Great Deer Escape c. 1703–1711,” in Environmental History in the Making: Volume I: Explaining, ed. Estelita Vaz, Cristina Joanaz de Melo, and Lígia M. Costa Pinto (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 341–357.

67.

To describe animal place-making as solely determined by food and shelter has long been considered overly simplistic. As the naturalist Frank Fraser Darling put it in his landmark 1930s study of Scottish red deer: “What are the reasons for the charm some places have for beasts and men? Shelter and a fresh bite are not a sufficient explanation.” Fraser Darling, A Herd of Red Deer, 10.

68.

Vaught, “Recentring the Animal in Multispecies Ethnography.”

69.

Marriott Webb, “A Red Deer History.”

70.

Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

71.

Susan Fraiman, “Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 1 (2012): 89–115.

72.

Erica Fudge, “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 3–18.

73.

Although see John Hartigan Jr., “How to Interview a Plant: Ethnography of Life Forms,” in Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 253–282.

74.

Fudge, “A Left-Handed Blow,” 6.

75.

Fudge, “Milking Other Men’s Beasts”; Philip Howell and Hilda Kean, “Writing in Animals in History,” in The Routledge Companion to Animal–Human History, ed. Hilda Kean and Philip Howell (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), 3–27.

76.

Benson, “Animal Writes.”

77.

Vinciane Despret, “The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis,” Body & Society 10, nos. 2–3 (2004): 111–134.

78.

Donald Worster, “Appendix: Doing Environmental History,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 289–308, 289.