They could disappear overnight: rare Italian deer make long journey to survival | Animals

May 2024 · 5 minute read
The deer are captured and tranquilised before beginning the long journey to their new home in southern Italy.

Under an ambitious conservation plan, 60 Mesola red deer are being moved from northern Italy to Calabria, where it is hoped they will thrive and multiply

by Lorenzo Colantoni. Photographs by Marco Barretta

In a meadow in northern Italy, the fog engulfs a forklift truck putting long, narrow boxes inside a green mounted police transporter. Small openings in the crates reveal the fearful looks of stocky deer, their antlers sawn off to prevent injury during transport. It will be a long trip, more than 1,000km (620 miles) and almost 20 hours of driving to Calabria in southern Italy, where they will be released.

The 20 animals in the crates are some of the 300 remaining Italian or Mesola red deer (Cervus elaphus italicus), a unique and endangered subspecies.

  • Time to move: an Italian red deer in the Bosco della Mesola nature reserve in northern Italy

This journey, from Bosco della Mesola nature reserve in Emilia Romagna to the Parco delle Serre in Calabria is one of the key steps of Operazione Cervo Italico – Operation Italian Deer – aimed at saving the deer from extinction.

The Mesola red deer is the last indigenous red deer of the Italian peninsula. It once thrived in the interconnected forests that covered the country’s north, but centuries of hunting and habitat destruction almost eradicated it. Only a handful of deer survived in Mesola Wood, which was spared from being converted to farmland, unlike much of the Po valley. By the end of the second world war there were 10, perhaps 15 individuals left. Seventy years of intensive and often complex conservation efforts by the State Forestry Corps, part of the Carabinieri police, allowed the population of Italian deer to grow to today’s number. Yet its survival is anything but guaranteed.

  • Selecting the individuals fit to start a new community in the south is a complex business

“The Italian deer could disappear overnight,” says Marco Galaverni, programme director of World Wide Fund for Nature Italy, which is helping to lead the operation. “A natural disaster, like a wildfire or a flood, like those happening increasingly often in this area, could threaten the whole population. With such low genetic variability, an epidemic also is a real – and devastating – possibility.”

  • Operation Italian Deer in action. Under cover of night, the team capture a deer and perform all the necessary health checks

It has, however, taken 10 years for Operation Italian Deer to get off the ground. “It [the deer] received much less recognition than other Italian iconic subspecies, such as the Marsican brown bear or the Apennine chamois,” says Giovanni Nobili of the Carabinieri’s biodiversity department.

  • It’s moving day. The deer are loaded by forklift truck into the transporter, and the 620-mile journey south begins

It took decades to classify the Italian deer as a separate subspecies, despite its clear differences from European mainland red deer – it has much simpler antlers, a stouter body and weighs about 40% less. This issue, and a lack of agreement between organisations, led to a delay in the creation of Operation Italian Deer. Finally, this year, it was launched under the auspices of WWF, the Carabinieri, the two nature reserves and the University of Siena.

  • Des res: an aerial view of their new home in the Parco delle Serre, Calabria

Under the plan, 60 deer are being moved to the park in Calabria, with the aim of building a new population. The area was designated by Ispra, the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, as one of the few having the right environmental conditions to host the subspecies and being far enough from European red deer to avoid interbreeding.

The first 20 were moved in March, with the rest to follow over the next couple of years. “This will allow us to monitor the evolution of the operation, and to adapt to all the issues we will encounter,” says Sandro Nicoloso, head of the team from the wildlife organisation Dream Italia, which is conducting the capture, transport and release of the deer.

  • Home sweet home: the deer are released into a new habitat that should allow them to thrive once more

The fittest male and females are identified in Mesola before being shot with a tranquilliser dart gun. The deer are retrieved from the dense undergrowth and taken to stables where they are housed for a week before being driven the entire length of Italy. Vets monitor the health of the deer during all phases of the operation and the animals are fitted with satellite tracking collars.

  • The operation doesn’t end there. Researchers will monitor the deer to make sure all is well

“The real challenge begins now,” says Galaverni after the deer are successfully delivered. The deer will need to adapt to their new habitat, as will local communities. Some farmers believe they could become a nuisance, like the fast-spreading boars.

“It will require a lot of talking and explaining to local communities, but the response has been very positive so far,” says Alfonso Grillo, commissioner of the Parco delle Serre. “People need to understand the incredible value of this process of renaturalisation that Italy, as well as Europe, is going through,” he adds.

  • The proverbial deer in the headlights. But this one should now have a far better chance of surviving

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

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