Milu or Père David’s Deer

(Elaphurus davidianus)

The first time I was able to see this rare and beautiful deer in its native homeland was in 1994, during my first visit to China. Dr. Guo Geng showed me round the Nan Haizi Milu Deer Park, just outside Beijing. Guo Geng is enthusiastic and passionate about his work, which includes the education outreach for this park. A small part of the park was like a zoo—enclosures held various deer and a few other hoofed animals—but there was also a large fenced-in wilderness area, complete with small lake, home to a herd of Père David’s deer—known in China as milu. How magnificent they looked grazing near the shore of the lake. They wore their grayish brown winter coats—but, said Guo Geng, their color changes to reddish brown during the summer. They are similar in size to the red deer of Scotland. One handsome male stood, seeming to look directly at me, proud and dignified. I could see no fences, no boundary to his wild space.

As I stood there watching the milu, my mind suddenly jumped far back in time. I vividly remembered visiting a herd of these deer on the duke of Bedford’s estate in England, and hearing that they were highly endangered and had originally come from China. That was in 1956, when I was working with a documentary film company in London and we were making a film at the estate. And now, forty years later, I was looking at some of the progeny of those very deer.

Extinction in China

Their story amazes me. The milu was once common in the open plains and marshes along China’s lower Yangtze River Basin. But, mainly as a result of habitat loss and probably some hunting, they were on the brink of extinction by 1900. The last known wild individual was shot in 1939 near the Yellow Sea. Fortunately for the survival of the species, the emperor of China had installed a large herd in his Imperial Hunting Park (Nan Haizi Park) near Beijing. The deer thrived in this park, which was surrounded by a forty-three-mile-long wall and guarded by a Tartar patrol.

In 1865, Père Armand David, a French Jesuit missionary, introduced the deer to the Western world. He had been passionately interested in nature from childhood, and had always wanted to go to China. He became a missionary, and his dream was realized when he was given a leave of absence for five months to tour in China. During this time, he collected numerous undescribed (at least to Westerners) plants and insects and sent them back to the natural history museum in Paris for study. He also described the golden monkey, some pheasants, and a squirrel, and was the first person to describe a giant panda to the West.

Historical photo of Père David himself, an extraordinary naturalist and explorer: savior of the milu. (Reprinted with the permission of the Deandreis-Rosati Memorial Archives, DePaul University, Chicago, IL)

During one of his travels, just outside Beijing, he came upon the wall that concealed the Imperial Hunting Park. Managing to look over, he saw some strange animals that looked a bit like reindeer, but he soon realized they were not. Back in Beijing, he tried to discover something about them and, failing, returned with an interpreter to the hunting park. Eventually, by providing some woolly caps and mittens to the guards (though one story says twenty silver pieces), he persuaded them to bring him some pieces of antlers and skin. Père David sent these precious specimens back to France, where they were examined and pronounced to be from a new species of deer—which was named in his honor.

There was a keen desire in Paris to obtain some live specimens. Eventually, after many failed attempts, the Chinese emperor was persuaded to gift three individuals to the French ambassador. Sadly they did not survive the arduous sea journey. But after further negotiations with the imperial staff, a few more pairs of the deer were gifted and this time arrived safely in Paris. There was much excitement about the arrival of the first Père David’s deer; eventually zoos in Germany and Belgium, as well as the Woburn Abbey park in England, also acquired specimens.

Soon there were approximately two dozen deer in Europe, in addition to the large herd remaining in China, and the survival of the species seemed assured. But in 1895, catastrophic floods devastated China, and a part of the wall surrounding the imperial park was destroyed. Many of the deer were killed by the floods; others that escaped through the breach in the wall were hunted and killed by the starving population. Still, between twenty and thirty survived in the park—enough to maintain the species. Alas, five years later they perished during the Boxer Rebellion, when troops occupied the imperial park and killed and ate every single deer.

Surviving in Europe

Thus the future of the deer depended on the few individuals in Europe—and the zoos found that they were reluctant to breed. When news of the slaughter of the last deer in China reached Herbrand, eleventh duke of Bedford, he realized the need to consolidate the scattered groups if the species was to be saved. Eventually he persuaded the various zoos to sell their animals, and by 1901 he had collected a total of fourteen Père David’s deer in the park at Woburn Abbey—the last individuals in existence. There were seven females (two of whom were barren), five males (one of whom established himself as the dominant stag), and two youngsters. It required years of patient management before these last survivors of a once abundant species began to breed.

In 1918, when the population numbered around ninety animals, they suffered yet another major setback: World War I caused widespread food shortages in Britain, which meant not enough food for the exotic deer, and the population was reduced to just fifty. After the war, numbers again began to increase, but in 1946, when the population of Père David’s deer had risen to three hundred, World War II created more shortages of food—and in addition, the herds were threatened by nearby enemy bombing. At this point, the duke of Bedford realized it would be wise to spread out the breeding population. By 1970, there were breeding groups of Père David’s deer in centers all over the world, with over five hundred at Woburn Abbey alone.

Planning the Return of the Milu

The decision to try to reintroduce these Chinese deer to their homeland was the idea of the then marquis of Tavistock, later the fourteenth duke of Bedford. It was not an easy operation, but finally, in 1985, twenty-two Père David’s deer—which would henceforth be known as milu—set off from Woburn Abbey to Beijing, accompanied by one of their keepers. In 2006, during my annual visit to Beijing, I told Guo Geng that I needed to know more of the history of the deer’s return to China. He told me that I should talk to a Slovakian woman, Maja Boyd. We planned to meet in Beijing, but sadly that meeting never took place as her cousin died, suddenly, and she had to fly back to Slovakia. However, just before Christmas that year, we spoke by telephone—she was in Slovakia, and I was in Bournemouth.

By the end of the conversation, I felt I had tapped into Maja’s warm and giving personality. She wanted me to know that when her late husband had first taken her to America, she had watched a film about me and the Gombe chimpanzees. “I so badly wanted to do something like you!” she said. Her American husband had been a good friend of Lord Tavistock, as the duke of Bedford then was. And when Maja learned about his plan to send Père David’s deer to China, she was fascinated. “It was the deer,” she told me, “that took me to China.”

She would have loved to release the deer into a really wild place. “But,” she said, “the government chose the site, and we needed their full support.” And it made good sense, for the place chosen for the deer park was once part of the Imperial Hunting Park as well as being close to the center of government in Beijing.

Maja Boyd, a guardian of Père David’s deer, shown here with a hand-reared female deer at the Nan Haizi Milu Reserve, Beijing. The young deer’s mother died soon after giving birth. Maja told me that this deer “followed me around like a dog.” (Maja Boyd)

Maja had gone to inspect the area prior to the return of the deer. She found that part of it was a tree nursery—which was fine. But there was also a pig farm, which Maja felt was not appropriate. The government agreed to move the pigs. Then they had to block access for a stream that flowed through the area, since it was horribly polluted. They dug nine little wells to provide water for the animals and embarked on the major project: filling the lake with clean water.

The new arrivals deserved the best the Chinese could give them. But there was another major problem. The officials in charge of building the required quarantine sheds insisted that they be designed like the traditional stall for cows or horses—with a half door. No matter how often Maja explained that deer were different, and would immediately leap over a half door, the Chinese would not, or could not, believe her. Matters came to a head when Lord Tavistock’s eldest son, Andrew Howland, arrived to inspect the accommodations for his precious deer. He was horrified when he saw the row of sheds with half doors, and insisted that they physically break down the doors. After this the doors were rebuilt—correctly! Finally, all was ready.

Return to the Ancestral Homeland

And so, in 1986, the twenty-two deer that had been born on an estate in faraway England—some of them, perhaps, offspring of those I had seen when I visited Woburn Abbey in 1956—set off for China. It was a long plane journey but much quicker than the sea voyages their ancestors had endured. Maja vividly remembers the day they arrived. She found it fascinating that they were traveling Air France. “These deer were first introduced to the Western world by a French missionary, and they came back on a French plane.” Everyone was so excited that they forgot what they were supposed to be doing as they struggled to get closer for a first glimpse of the historic cargo. The containers were jostled, and both Maja and the keeper who had traveled with them from the UK feared the cages would fall and the deer escape. Fortunately, although they had not been sedated, the deer themselves remained very calm. “In fact,” said Maja, “they behaved much better than the humans present!”

Finally all the cages were loaded onto trucks, and the deer set off on the last part of their long journey. Maja said she felt so sorry for the hundreds of excited people who lined the roads, hoping for a glimpse of the new arrivals, because all they saw were the trucks. What a moment when the deer finally entered their quarantine quarters and stood on Chinese soil—where their ancestors had roamed half a century before. Right from the start the Chinese were very proud of the project, and there was a great deal of publicity. Children, in particular, were interested.

“We got a lot of letters from kids,” Maja told me. She remembered one in particular from a five-year-old girl. Her parents had given her two RMB (at the time, this would have been about seventy-five cents) for a month’s pocket money. She sent it to the deer park and asked if they would “please buy chocolate for the uncle and auntie Milu so they know they’ve arrived in a country that welcomes them.”

There was one unexpected outcome of the return of the milu. When local villagers heard about the deer park, they realized that it would be a perfect place, quiet and green, for burying the cremation remains of their loved ones. And so, after a death, they went there and dug little graves in the park. Maja told me she was once walking the grounds with a Chinese official. He looked at the graves and announced, “We must eliminate these.” But Maja told him that in her native country—Slovakia—it is very bad luck to desecrate a grave. The official looked around, took her by the hand, and whispered that they, too, feel the same. So today there is a special place where one can see little mounds—and the people have permission to return there every year during the Qing Ming Festival at the beginning of April, when Chinese pay their respects to the dead.

Visiting the Père David’s Deer at Woburn Abbey

Maja arranged for a few of the Chinese scientists involved with the Père David’s deer to visit the UK, and a highlight was their visit to Woburn Abbey. There they would meet the people who are working to maintain the herds outside China. I was hoping to join them, but unfortunately the Chinese delegation arrived the day I had to leave for America. Still, I was able to meet Maja for the first time during my visit to Woburn Abbey, and Lord Robin Russell (son of the duke of Bedford) was a charming host.

For almost a week it had been raining, but after my sister Judy and I had driven all day in heavy rain, the sun came out to create a glorious spring evening. The grass was brilliant green, the old oaks a softer olive shade. At first, the only Père David’s we found was one that had “double-shed”—lost his antlers before the rut and not yet grown new ones. Without them he could not compete with the others, and was probably wise to avoid the herd. We passed herds of sika deer, roe deer, fallow deer—and the spectacular red deer. Where were the Père David’s? We searched and searched, and finally found them down where it was very wet. What a wonderful sight—about two hundred of them, their coats a rich golden color in the light of the setting sun.

Too soon twilight began to fall and we had to leave them. But then, in the charming old cottage where Robin lives with his wife, we sat and talked deer. I got to know Maja better and learned more about the history of the Père David’s project. Robin generously offered me access to the photo archives. And we discussed forming a collaboration between their education program and the Jane Goodall Institute’s Roots & Shoots.

A Final Dispatch from China

During my Asia tour in the fall of 2007, Maja arranged for me to revisit the milu park outside Beijing. There I was very pleased to meet two of the delegation to Woburn Abbey whom I had missed in the summer: Director Zhang Li Yuan, and Chinese Professor Wang Zongyi, who has been so instrumental in reintroducing the deer and such a very big help to Maja. After sitting and talking (with Maja translating) and drinking hot tea, we set off on a golf cart to see the deer. It was bitterly cold with icicles hanging down from some of the trees, and I was glad I had dressed warmly.

That tour depressed me. The first time I had visited the park, there had been a real feeling of being in the countryside, even though it is so close to Beijing. But now there is development pressing in from all sides. The herd of milu had grown. They had eaten all the available grass so that, especially in the winter, they needed supplementary food. They appeared healthy enough, but they were standing around their feeding troughs looking somehow weary—bored, perhaps. They almost looked like a different species from what I had seen in 1994; the sense of freedom and nobility that had been so strong during my previous visit to this place was no longer there.

We were glad to get back inside the comparative warmth of the little environment center. As we enjoyed a truly delicious vegetarian lunch, my hosts told me about the twenty-five-hundred-acre nature reserve in Shishou in central China, on the Yangtze River. At the beginning of the 1990s, I heard, China’s National Environment Protection Agency had agreed that a small herd could be moved to this area, where they settled down well. And some individuals swam across the river and started a truly free-ranging population on the other side, in Hunan province. At first there were concerns that they would be hunted, but instead the local population reveres and protects them. Both Maja and Professor Wang Zongyi begged me to make time to go and see these milu, living in the wild as they did so long ago, and one day I should love to do so.

In the meantime, I carry around a glass medallion, given to me by Guo Geng, embossed with a drawing of the milu made during the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220). And at our JGI office in Beijing, we have an antler, shed by a four-year-old stag, that I take to lectures when I am in China as one of my symbols of hope. It represents the resilience of animals if we just give them a chance. Since returning to China in 1985, the milu have prospered and their numbers have increased. There are about a thousand now, all told.