FORESTRY bosses have welcomed the trial of two schemes to support deer management in specific areas of the central belt and Highlands.
Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) officials say some land managers need to do more to help control deer numbers to reduce damage to forests.
Under new NatureScot pilot projects, landowners and deerstalkers are to be paid a bonus for animals they cull over and above the numbers currently controlled on their land. One scheme covers an area of 959 km2 to the north of Glasgow and west of Stirling, while the other will cover an area 527 km2 on the south-eastern side of Loch Ness in the Highlands.
The FLS call comes after recent trials of drone-mounted thermal imaging cameras to monitor deer numbers. Surveys carried out to test the usefulness of the technique have gathered evidence showing that despite culling, deer are continually migrating into FLS-managed forests from neighbouring land where more could be done to control population levels.
The drone surveys (undertaken by BH Wildlife Consultancy between October 2023 and May 2024), combined with cull data, have the potential to significantly improve understanding of deer population dynamics, particularly immigration, on public woodland sites.
There are external factors such as seasonality and weather that need to be considered when comparing between surveys but all the data points towards high immigration levels. In one particular forest, 87 deer were culled from a population of 198 animals but a repeat survey three months later found the population had only dropped to 192 animals.
Graeme Prest, FLS’s director of land management and regions, said: “Woodland creation, native habitat restoration and timber production are vitally important elements in meeting Scotland’s Biodiversity Strategy and Net Zero commitments.
“There are many partners helping to meet these challenges and achieve these ends and all of our forestry activity contributes substantially towards these goals.
“However, recovery of biodiversity at the landscape scale through sustainable forest management can be hampered by inaction in some places when it comes to deer population levels.
“All land managers need to take a similar, strong approach to deer management and do more to control deer numbers and the trial of these incentive schemes is to be welcomed.”
FLS manages 9 per cent of Scotland’s land area, yet every year carries out one third of the country's national deer cull.
Ben Harrower, BH Wildlife Consultancy, added: “It has been known for a long time that immigration takes place from open hill environments into woodland due to the food resource availability and the shelter it provides but this project has shown the scale at which it is happening on Scotland's national forests and land.
“Essentially within a calendar year, the detected deer population can replace itself despite high culling efforts. On the back of this project, we are starting a similar project in Germany where we are going to look at the differences of deer and boar populations over a five year period.”
The work provides a framework for analysing how deer move within the wider landscape and FLS sites, highlights the complexities involved, and offers recommendations for future studies and data interpretation.
Graeme added: "Not controlling deer numbers to maintain population levels that are in balance with habitats is short sighted and undermines the efforts of those land managers who are working extremely hard to contribute to Scotland’s response to the Climate and Biodiversity emergency.”
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