Red Deer 
59 
picture on which I was then engaged, but though Mr. Macleay most kindly wrote to 
some twenty keepers, and took infinite trouble to supply my want, the bird and I never 
came together till it was too late. 
My old friend, Mr. J. E. Harting, sends me the following interesting note with 
regard to a herd of red deer from a single hind. It is in the form of a letter addressed 
to Sir William Flower by Mr. J. A. Houblon of Hallingbury Park, Bishop-Stortford. 
A red deer hind was hunted by Mr. Petre’s hounds into this neighbourhood and lost in 1875. 
I was walking soon afterwards in the forest (Hatfield Broad Oak) when I saw the hind with a male 
calf at her feet. Since 1877 s ^ e has had one C£ df every year except one, though no stag except 
her own offspring has been seen in the forest since she was lost and left there. Two young harts 
got drowned on going to drink at a muddy place from which they were unable to extricate themselves. 
In 1881 we killed and ate a five-year-old stag thus reared, and another last year (1886). The heads 
of these are good average heads, and are now hung up in our hall. They have each of them ten 
SHOT THROUGH THE LUNGS 
points, and neither of them showed any signs of degeneracy that we could perceive. There are now 
(28th May 1887) five red deer in Hatfield Broad Oak Forest, all of them sprung, as we believe, 
from this solitary hind. 
A very interesting note appeared in the Field for 12th September 1896, contributed 
by Mr. P. H. Grimshaw, on the parasites which affect deer. r Very few of us know 
much about these disagreeable creatures, and in fact it was not till June 1894 that any 
observer had discovered that the wild red deer had a large bot-fly, which was the exclusive 
parasite of the red deer. Mr. P. H. Grimshaw thus describes the fly which is known 
to naturalists as Cephenomyia rufibarbis. 
The red deer bot-fly is a very handsome insect, and, though a true fly, is quite bee-like in 
appearance. It measures nearly three-quarters of an inch in length, and is thickly clothed over the 
whole body with long silky hairs. Like all other flies, it may be easily distinguished from a bee by 
its possessing only one pair of wings. The head is black, but clothed behind with yellowish hairs. 
The face is silvery in certain lights, while on the lower part it has a beautiful tuft of reddish-yellow 
hairs, a feature which gives rise to its scientific name of rufibarbis, or “red-bearded.” 
Mr. Grimshaw goes on to quote the graphic account which Friedrich Brauer, the 
