UKHunter
AH fanatic
I thought I would share with you my success last night in taking this nice Fallow buck. He wont make a medal but is a very nice representative head from here in England. I have some big bucks running round on the estate, and he was the smallest of bachelor herd he was in. There are the 4 main varieties of Fallow on the estate, and we are trying to cull out the darker varieties to leave the most familiar brown with white spots ones. These varieties occur naturally within the gene pool and are not the result of captive breeding variations. They are wild and free roaming.
In this picture you can see the result's of my last week stalking. Here you can really compare in size the smallest of our deer species, Muntjac, to one of our larger species, Fallow.
There is a high amount of deer on the estate causing a lot of damage to the bio-diversity of our ecosystems, due to the grazing pressure on local flora. In this picture I have put a red line across to mark a browse line. This is essentially the level at which the deer feed up to from ground level.
As you can see there is no green growth bellow the browse line and indicates a high population of deer in the area. The browse line can also be a very good indicator of what species of deer are present. The 6 deer species we have are all of different height's and so each will have a different height at which they browse. We are currently culling around 200 deer a year off the estate, but this is still not enough to cull the population to an acceptable level.
In this picture you can see the result's of my last week stalking. Here you can really compare in size the smallest of our deer species, Muntjac, to one of our larger species, Fallow.
There is a high amount of deer on the estate causing a lot of damage to the bio-diversity of our ecosystems, due to the grazing pressure on local flora. In this picture I have put a red line across to mark a browse line. This is essentially the level at which the deer feed up to from ground level.
As you can see there is no green growth bellow the browse line and indicates a high population of deer in the area. The browse line can also be a very good indicator of what species of deer are present. The 6 deer species we have are all of different height's and so each will have a different height at which they browse. We are currently culling around 200 deer a year off the estate, but this is still not enough to cull the population to an acceptable level.