Fieldsports Britain - A Year in the Life of Red Deer, part 2

We are stalking red stags with Niall Rowantree on the Ardnamurchan Estate. A few weeks in the late summer and autumn are almost all the time a Scottish estate has to make money out of deerstalking. Niall and his team are working flat out to give the clients what they want: the glorious Scottish landscape and the excitement of creeping up on Scotland's most iconic animal.
This is part two of our four-part film A Year in the Life of Red Deer, where we follow Niall Rowantree of West Highland Hunting in his work managing red deer and other game on the estate in the West Highlands. The film is kindly supported by riflemaker Blaser and optics company Leica.
Here are the links:
▶ To watch the rest of the episodes in this series, go to A Year in the Life of Red Deer www.fieldsportschannel.tv/aye...
▶ For more about Blaser in the UK, visit www.blaser-sporting.com
▶ For Blaser in the rest of the world, go to www.blaser.de
▶ For #LeicaHunting kit, visit uk.leica-camera.com/Sport-Opti...
▶ For Niall Rowantree and West Highland Hunting, go to westhighland-hunting.co.uk
No News or Hunting KZhead this week - we are devoting the whole show to this film.
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We’re proud to promote enjoyment of fieldsports and the countryside. There are three guiding principles to everything we do on Fieldsports Channel:
▶ Shoot responsibly
▶ Respect the quarry
▶ Ensure a humane, clean and quick kill
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Why shoot deer?
There are more than two million red, roe, fallow, sika, muntjac and Chinese water deer in Britain’s countryside and semi-urban areas, the highest level for 1,000 years. Numbers have doubled since 1999, according to the Deer Initiative, the UK government’s deer agency.
Deer are an attractive and an important part of our wildlife. However, they have no natural predator in the UK so numbers must be sensibly and strategically managed to keep them in balance with their habitat and to prevent damage to crops, trees, woodland flora, gardens and other wildlife.
Deer cause £4.5 million-worth (Forestry Commission Scotland) of damage to plantations and other commercial woodlands in Scotland. Crop damage is estimated at £4.3m a year according to DEFRA, with the greatest damage on cereal crops in east and south-west England.
More than 8,000 hectares (Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology) of woodland with SSI status is currently in ‘unfavourable’ or ‘recovering’ condition due to deer impacts such as browsing and fraying. Deer can also influence the variety of wildlife in woodlands and other habitats by altering structural and plant species diversity. According to the University of East Anglia’s Dr Paul Dolman, that has resulted in a 50% decline in woodland bird numbers where deer are present, impacting particularly on nightingales, blackcaps, chiffchaffs and warblers.
Deer are susceptible to Bovine TB and may be responsible for the transmission of TB to cattle. They are also the likely driver behind the UK’s increasing tick population (Scharlemann et al 2008).
Happily, venison is a delicious meat. It is wild, natural and free range, and - almost fat-free - it is one of the healthiest meats available today. Results from research commissioned by the Game-to-Eat campaign (Leatherhead Food International Research 2006) suggest that there are real health benefits to eating game. Venison is high in protein, low in saturated fatty acids and contains higher levels of iron than any other red meat.