THERE are probably now more deer lurking among our woods and forests than at any time since William the Conqueror seized the throne of England, or so the good people at Defra tell us. And with plans to plant 30,000 hectares of new woodland a year, that’s simply too many cervine mouths munching, stripping, browsing and causing unacceptable levels of damage. We’ve got to do something about it, says the latest Government consultation on deer management. But what?
For around 20 years I’ve been managing deer across various farms and estates in East Anglia. Deerstalking is generally thought of as a solitary occupation. I do indeed go out on my own at dawn and dusk, week after week from harvest time right through until the flush of new growth in April and May makes deerstalking increasingly difficult. Yet the most effective and certainly the most enjoyable moments in the stalking year are the group culls that I organise about three or four times a season.
While a single rifle can, with luck and the appropriate degree of skill, bowl over perhaps twosame moment across the same estate and you can ensure that all the principal rides are staked out and that outlying woods are covered. Now, instead of a couple of deer in the larder you might have many times that number, besides which you can get far more comprehensive intelligence about deer movements across the property to inform future operations than is possible from observation by a single pair of eyes.
