Friday 23 March 2012

Dear Oh Deer

On these warm spring days it is great to spend a bit of time trying to find a little more of our wildlife that we have on the farm.  I managed to take this picture up on the hill of three fallow deer, sunning themselves and having a quick breakfast .  (It was last week, before winter returned!).  We have quite a healthy population of Fallow and Roe deer on the farm and also a few Muntjac deer as well, which are treated as more of a pest.  It is nice to see a few deer around on the farm although they can cause quite a lot of damage when numbers are high.  Damage includes grazing grass and crops, knocking over stone walls, when they try and jump over them, destroying any newly planted tree saplings and crashing through electric sheep fence.
They spend much of the time out in the fields, grazing our combinable crops or eating grass, meant for the sheep.  Sometimes they are found in the woodland, which is not a problem in a mature woodland but we now have to fence them out of any new woodland plantings as they would decimate the newly planted trees.
They soon become a very expensive addition to our wildlife up on the hill.

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