Bark and a tasty bite

Among the world’s most ancient groups of deer species, muntjac walked the earth during the Miocene epoch along with mastodons and smilodons — sabre-tooth tigers — in essentially the same form as we know them today.

Although they were present in Europe 15 million years ago, in more recent times muntjac have been native to east Asia. There are 12 species, the newest being the leaf muntjac, described to science as recently as 1997. It is not impossible that more species await discovery in the forests of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos or Burma (now Myanmar).

The muntjac we in Britain know so well, however, is or Reeves’s muntjac, which is native to eastern China and was named after John Russell Reeves, a tea inspector with the British East India Company