Sustainability

The reintroduction of the deer

The areas where deer used to live must have covered a large part of mainland Italy and Sardinia. Since the 17th century, environmental changes, the increase in population and hunting have caused this species to slowly disappear from larger and larger areas of Italy. In the late 19th century, only a small population remained in the Bosco della Mesola (near the Po delta) and another one in Sardinia. This situation essentially continued until after World War II, apart from some more or less occasional specimens migrated from Switzerland. This expansion of deer populations from Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia to the southern side of the Alps increased and became more consistent in the Fifties and has been responsible for the restocking of the central and eastern parts of the Italian Alps. Quite a different matter is the deer of western Alps, northern and central Apennines, which have been brought back there in the late Sixties. In Sardinia, deer disappeared instead from the central-northern area in the Forties and it was only in the mid-Eighties that it began to be proactively controlled to increase its number and distribution area. At present, the deer population all over Italy can be estimated to make up approximately 32,000 heads.