Deer?

Thank you everyone for your help and advice. Now where do I start to reply....

Well, I don't think it was a Yeti Armandii.

I'm thinking Hares now too. Nothing I do fencing wise would keep animals out. I have no fence as such, just posts with a few strips of wire running through them to define the boundary. Even if I could keep them from going over a fence I wouldn't be able to stop them from going under. I don't want to shut them out anyway and want to keep the open aspect. It will be easier to protect the plants.

Thanks, I had that in mind.

 

we regularly see mainly young deer running from one side to the other when driving along lots of accidents sadly to them and cars but we are surrounded by fields woods here and around us...Never seen a fox here which there are of course or a badger..unlike Bexhill we had then day and night time, foxes where always waiting for our chickens and ducks as their food and it was scary and we did lose some along the way..very very upsetting and would never have ducks now but just chickens...just Love Ducks and Like Chickens...enjoyed the badgers funny antics except their excavation abilities was a nightmare...have fence, badger cannot get access, so they act like a mini JVB...still loved them though..the babies you could eat um....

 

I think I'll have to consider defending the Holly against both Deer And Hares.

I don't think it's a Winter Haggis, probably the only creature that I haven't seen in the garden.

Thanks but not a road I want to go down FC for a number of reasons. I don't have the ability to set it up. I don't want CCTV. I have an ancient mobile phone that I don't use. I have a computer, yes, but don't want to tie myself to it anymore than I do now.

If you can understand where I'm coming from....I live rurally, I'm surrounded by and am at one with nature in all it's forms and love it. I don't want to shut it out of my garden and I don't want to turn my garden into Fort Knox or similar as there would be no point in living here.

I wandered around the garden in the snow yesterday looking at all the different footprints, both birds and four legged creatures and was fascinated. Take all this away from me and I would be totally miserable. I'm probably one of few people that is happy to be in lockdown.

 

I'm going to say deer. Deer tend to have the teenage boy scuff kind of gait, rather than the hoppy floppy bounce of leporids and also the latter tend to nibble the bark on saplings and shrubs.
Of course I might be totally wrong, it could be a big rabbit with antlers

 

It seems that deer are mostly in mind from the replies here. But thinking on this, why would deer choose just one plant in the garden when there is a plentiful supply of scrub in the surrounding area? Bearing in mind that the holly has not been touched before, only while there has been snow on the ground, a hare makes more sense to me. With it's supply of food under snow it perhaps was searching for something above ground to nibble on. Having said that, whichever animal it is, it doesn't seem to have eaten any of what has been nibbled.

Now, a big rabbit with antlers may be a possibility, I'll keep my camera handy for that. Or even a hare with antlers, there aren't any rabbits in or around the garden.

 

It's a roebucktoothedfloppyhorned leporideer
Fantastic stitching, BTW

 

All of you good people who suggested deer.....were right.

Proof came from my neighbour last week who had spotted it stripping mature shrubs in her garden. The interesting thing is that all the shrubs attacked including my holly had light coloured or variegated leaves.

My neighbour said snow hadn't laid that long (six weeks +) without a thaw, as far back as she could remember. So with no access to ground grazing, we believe the deer had started on the shrubs, tastier than the surrounding scrub no doubt.

 

Now you know....here's a tip for protecting anything really precious. Take one sheet of heavy-duty concrete reinforcing mesh and a heavy-duty pair of cutters/wire snips. Cut 'Christmas-tree' shapes with a 15cm (or thereabouts) stem. If you alternate the direction of cut, it maximises how many you get from a sheet. Stick one of these silhouettes in the ground near the treasured plant/shrub/tree. I've no idea why it works (or whether it works on non-French deer) but it's certainly worked for me.