90 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
This will happen not only when the animal is pursued by the 
hunter, but when it has discovered beyond its accustomed haunts 
- some unusually good feeding ground, or hears the call of a doe 
in the breeding season. 
The cry of the Roe is a horse bleat, resembling the word 
boeuf, without the final f. In Germany the foresters imitate it 
very cleverly with a piece of coarse grass, or a bit of the inner 
bark of the birch tree, placed between the lips. 
The food of the Roe is of a varied nature; grass, leaves, 
heather, and the young shoots of spruce and oak forming its 
chief sustenance. Amongst other plants, the Rubus saxatilis is 
said to be such a favourite as to have earned for it in the 
Highlands the name of Roebuck-berry. The late Edward 
Alston once examined the contents of the stomachs of two Roe- 
deer, buck and doe, shot in the month of October, and found 
remains of grass, moss, blaeberry leaves, young heather, spruce 
shoots, a little corn, and numerous fragments of various species 
of fungi which abounded in the woods where the deer were shot.* 
This cbservation has since been confirmed.t 
“ Nothing can be more graceful,” says Charles St. John,f “than 
the light and agile movements of this animal while nibbling the 
tender shoots of the bushes and trees on which it feeds. The 
wild rose and the bramble are amongst its favourite morsels; 
from the long twigs of these plants it nibbles off leaf by leaf in 
the most graceful manner imaginable. The foresters accuse 
these animals of being very destructive to the young oak trees, 
and fond as I am of them, I am afraid I must admit the accusa- 
tion is just, as they undoubtedly prefer the topmost shoot of a 
young oak tree to almost any other food. Nevertheless the mischief 
done to the woods by Roe is trifling when compared to that 
of Rabbits.” St. John might have added that the practice of 
rubbing their new horns against the branches and stems of trees 
causes much injury to the young plantations. Where Roe-deer are 
plentiful you may see in all directions the stems stripped of their 
bark which hangs down in ribbons. 
In severe winters the Roe suffers greatly ; it sinks into the 
deep snow, and may sometimes be found embedded to the flanks, 

* Alston, ‘ Zoologist,’ 1864, p. 9359. + ‘The Field,’ Aug. 12th, 1871. 
{ ‘Natural History and Sport in Moray,’ p. 250. 
