Red Deer Management - Now is the time to gather the data.
These are 3 trail camera clips from a recent welfare survey I’ve been doing for client. She was under the belief that the small woodland was only holding around 6 or 7 Red Deer. The deer fencing had failed about 4 years ago in a couple of places and the Red Deer moved in. With no public access and hunting pressure minimal (deer only lethally controlled for welfare reasons as per the owners wishes) the Red Deer have numbers have increased significantly.
Estimating deer populations to a reasonable degree of accuracy requires unbiased data collection using an appropriate cost effective means and statistacal modelling. What is more important though is understanding what level of accuracy is needed to ensure woodland and deer management plans have the right actions in place.
From the 3 clips above and it can be seen that approx 27 Red Deer pass though the trail camera. There is nearly 20 seconds inbetween each of the clips, so any deer passing in that window would not have been counted. What is also not known is how many deer have crossed this area on the other side of the trail camera. For our purposes though this is good starting point to base the deer management plan on. Quick modelling, using some broad assumption would be that this group is a Hind and yearling group. By understanding Red deer ecology it can be assumed that half the group is adult female (approx. 12 rounded down as an injured Hind was recently culled out). If 80% of these give birth in the next couple of months then the population will increase by another 10. Another factor worth considering is that by next autumn this years young will be off breeding age. If the young number approx. 14 then it could be assumed that 50% are female, so another 7 Hinds will be producing young next year. We can refine this figure shortly as last year’s male young will very shortly start to show pedicles as the start of antler growth. As can be seen from the very broad quick population modelling, what started as a small handful of Red Deer quickly develops to a signficant number.
Other factors to focus on now, will be measuring the impact on the woodland habitat flora, which we would anticipate to be high. I also need to understand the how often this group is residing in this small area.
Impacts I have already noticed is the displacement of the Roe Deer in the area who used to be at healthy number. The difficulty that comes now is that the number of deer to be culled is significant to get the population back to a level that the habitat can support and that is healthy for the conservation of Red Deer as a species.