The paté of the Land
Chinese water deer, partridges and paté
This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Lately, just before dawn — which at this time of the year is about 5.45am — I’ve been getting up to go Chinese water deer stalking. Chinese water deer are extraordinary animals to look at. Their rumps are higher than their heads, they have faces like teddy bears, and the males have large menacing tusks. They were introduced to Woburn Abbey in 1896 by the then-Duke of Bedford, and a few years later a couple of virile escapees established the English population.
That particular Duke, Herbrand Russell, who was the 11th of his line, has a lot to answer for. He was also the genius behind releasing muntjac deer and grey squirrels. Admittedly, Chinese water deer only tend to graze away at farmers’ crops, rather than destroying entire hedgerows and browsing scrubby woodland understorey where the last of the nightingales sing, but they do still need to be managed. When farming is as hard as it is, a hungry horde of Chinese water deer eating its way through your sugarbeet is very unwelcome.
Happily they are, I think, the most delicious of the six deer species we have in this country. Unlike muntjac, roe deer or red deer, they are much fattier, which means that in a culinary sense you can do a lot with them, and the steaks are a bit like a good ribeye.
Last Friday, I was out after a Chinese water deer in a stretch of water meadow with a chalk stream running through it. The last of the woodcock seemed to have flown — their migration back to Siberia and Finland is a long one. And ducks in the standing floodwater appeared to be pairing up for spring. Early march is an in-between time when there are buds on thorns, but the wind can still be biting.
The wind wasn’t quite right and despite seeing a Chinese and a muntjac, I couldn’t catch up with either of them, so I slung my rifle over my back and wandered home along the old hedgerows.
As I got to one of the last fields I spotted in a dip three roe deer. Getting down on my belly so my profile was flat against the land, I crawled towards them. When I was about 70 yards out, I got up on my hands and knees for a better look. There was one buck and two does.
They could clearly scent something on the wind but before they realised I was there, I shot the nearest doe. The other two animals bounded away, pausing for just a moment to look back, before they slipped through a hedge in the distance.
On my way back to my cottage after gralloching the deer, I spotted beside a pheasant feeder a pair of English partridges. The English or “grey” partridge, has suffered disastrously because of agricultural intensification and predation, and numbers have declined by around 90 per cent in 50 years.
As I got closer to them, they took flight across the field, flying together as a pair of English always will, whilst cheeping their scratchy cry on the wing.
That afternoon, I asked the local gamekeeper what I could do to try and help them breed and establish a covey. He had a few suggestions. I could try to trap the magpies that eat their eggs, I could put partridge feeders out, and I could have a word with the lady whose cats hunt the meadows.
He said it would be an uphill struggle but one that I should go at as hard as I can. If people don’t do their bit for English partridges, they could soon be gone from places where they were once an essential part of the landscape and culture.
The following week, I posted a picture on Instagram of some pâté I’d made with the roe liver. It’s important to try to use as much of an animal you’ve hunted as you can. Most people seemed to think it looked excellent except for two vegans. “Your obsession with killing animals is deeply disturbing,” one wrote. I don’t tend to pay much notice to that sort of thing, but on that occasion it made me think back to those grey partridges. “But I’m obsessed with saving them, too,” I said out loud. I might have replied, but I had too much pâté to eat and there was a lot of brandy left over.
