Deer stalking privileged? Not at Beinn Eighe community scheme

Not long ago, Todd was someone who had never held a gun, or dreamt of hunting, but, as one of the participants in a pioneering Community Stalking Initiative, she has now taken the first steps on a journey that will see her able to stalk in her local Beinn Eighe Nature Reserve.

"Hunting," the Canadian consultant says, " is quite a big thing in rural Canada, but I’m from Toronto and I never thought I would shoot anything ever in my life. My parents think it’s hilarious.

“I always thought stalking was a privileged thing. In the UK I thought it was rich people who did it in sporting estates. Then. once we moved here, three years ago, I started to understand the conservation element of it.”

What she came to understand is a nature restoration message that, in a Scotland where deer numbers and range have expanded over the past fifty years,  if we are to bring woodland back to our relatively treeless landscapes, their densities need to be kept low. 

Jackie Todd shooting for her level one test (Image: Vicky Allan)

The Beinn Eighe scheme, along with another at Creag Meagaidh National Nature Reserve, is one of two in Scotland, run by government agencyNatureScot, that aim to get local people, not from sporting backgrounds,  involved in stalking deer, which are being kept to low densities in the reserve..

The impact of deer on trees is something Todd, 34 years old, and her partner Fergus Brooks, 32 years old, have observed for themselves since they moved, four years ago, to Kinlochewe, in order to both enjoy the outdoors and work remotely.

Brooks, a communications and graphic design professional, explains: “Since moving here I’ve appreciated the impact deer have on the landscape. You can see it everywhere. Even in our garden."

"At first, I was pretty shocked that a nature reserve was shooting animals. It seems counter-intuitive that it would be taking out some of its nature. But as soon as you spend a few minutes talking with Doug Bartholomew, the reserve manager here, it makes sense. It's about rebalancing."

Neither came into the scheme with experience in shooting. Todd had, she says, never once shot a gun prior to this project, but, she observes brightly, she has found she is “actually quite good”.

Even so, she recalls, the first time she tried it she was taking 20 minutes between each shot because she found it “nerve-wracking”.

“The idea of actually firing a bullet made me feel quite anxious in the moment. That was one of the big things. So every time I went to shoot it my heart would start going, I would start wobbling and I would have to resettle. And that’s not even an animal, it’s just a plastic target.”

Todd recalls two times she felt squeamish during her introduction to deer stalking. One was her first experience of gralloching - the traditional process of removing internal organs which begins with the insertion of a knife into its neck to bleed it. “The first time,” she reflects, “it feels bad. But it passes. It’s surprising how quickly it begins to feel like part of the process”.

“The first time I saw a deer die,” says Brooks, “I was sad. You see something that has got so much energy and movement, and then suddenly it’s just shut off with one shot. But after a while of going out a few times and getting used to the process, that initial fear and hesitation wore off.”

Brooks grew up in Glasgow and most of his previous shooting experience had been playing Call of Duty or taking shots at fairground stalls."To begin with." he says, "stalking didn't appeal. I thought of it as the traditional sport of people going out stag hunting."

The couple, however, describe themselves as "outdoorsy" and moved to Kinlochewe after they began to spend so much time in the Highlands it made sense.

They now rarely eat any meat other than venison. A year ago, says Todd, they got a deer from the reserve and still have some of it in their freezer now. “If we’re shooting deer and eating that as our meat, that is a really positive thing for the environment, more sustainable than going to the shop and buying pack of chicken breasts. It’s a good way to eat meat and feel good about it.”  

Fergus Brooks does his shooting test (Image: Vicky Allan) Another participant on the course, Charlie Burrow, an outdoor instructor from Gairloch who runs works part-time at a development trust, sums up his reasons for taking part. “I like venison. I like the idea of kind of helping out with conservation things and I like the idea of being fairly community minded.”

Like Todd and Brooks, his background is not rural. He grew up in London and arrived at the Scottish outdoors by way of becoming a ski instructor. “I’m passionate about regeneration of trees," he says. "My wife and I have a croft and I want to deer fence it and get trees growing.”

Most people he knows locally, he says are positive about deer control. “The deer are quite bad at the moment around the Gairloch peninsula. People are getting their gardens trashed. Everyone is having to pay for deer fences. Those who can’t pay for deer fences have then a higher deer density.  I think because people can see the effects deer have, they are quite open to having them shot.” 

But the killing of deer is not without its local controversies. Only earlier this year, there was backlash when a Loch Torridon icon, Callum, a stag that had taken to frequenting the Beinn Eighe car park and approaching visitors for food, was humanely euthanised. 

Schemes like this are part of a shift taking place around how, across Scotland, deer are managed - and, of course, some of that change is controversial. Sporting estates and land managers are feeling a way of life under threat, in the name of woodland regeneration.

Particularly contentious, has been a recent proposal for Deer Management Nature Restoration Orders, which could see NatureScot able to force land managers to cull deer.  Also unpopular with sporting estates is the recommendation that stalkers should have a certificate, which would include some highly experienced deer managers, who have been stalking for decades without one. 

John Allan, the Moray-based instructor who is leading the tests at Beinn Eighe has worked in the stalking world for decades and has seen attitudes change vastly in that time. He observes:  "Deer seem to have gone from being an iconic part of the Scottish landscape to almost classed as vermin. I am happy to do these courses with various  bodies as it gives us the chance to give the candidates the truth about what actually happens on estates. It helps them understand where we are coming from."

Charlie Burrow, community stalker (Image: Douglas Bartholomew)

But other policies have been more welcomed. Two NatureScot pilot schemes have been launched this autumn that will pay qualified deerstalkers for extra deer culled over and above the current level in each areas. 

At the heart of the shift is this question of nature restoration. I've partly come to Beinn Eighe to see what that means. 

Looking out over the shooting targets and a long drizzled stretch of Beinn Eighe National Nature Reserve,  Doug Bartholomew, reserve manager, points out a thick bank of trees that are the largest remnant of ancient Caledonian pinewood in the North West of  Scotland. It was to protect these that the national reserve, Scotland’s first, was set up.

He also gestures to the smaller trees dotted between and the work done in recent years to plant and foster regeneration by providing a new seed source. 

That natural regeneration, he explains, is taking place - but one of its barriers, is what he describes as the “high herbivore impact”, the deer who browse on the trees. 

Jackie Todd shooting for her level one test (Image: Vicky Allan)

To counter this the reserve operates a deer management strategy to keep densities to a level that allows regeneration. “We’re wanting deer,” he says, “but at very low densities, about one to two deer per km2 which is really low compared to a lot of Scotland.”

The national mean density of red deer on open-hill ground in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, which was in winter 2018/19 estimated at 9.35 deer per km2, but has also been dropping due to control by other regeneration-oriented landowners.

Two different deer density zones exist on the reserve, which stretches over 5000 hectares  from the islands of Loch Maree to the summits of Beinn Eighe. One is this low level zone, the other an  area of oceanic heath, which tolerates higher densities, of around four per km2. 

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Doug Bartholomew is himself a relative newcomer to stalking and only began around eight years ago when he came to work on the reserve.  “I wasn’t interested in killing things, but I really enjoy stalking as a way of connecting with your environment and seeing the ground in a different way, getting out on the hill,. It’s so important to the management here. We’re doing it for a really good reason. It’s good for the environment.”

The community initiative, he says, is an attempt to make stalking more inclusive. “The idea is to enable people who might have an interest in stalking but don’t necessarily have the means to access that. It’s to break down some of those barriers and increase that skillset in the area.”

“Stalking can be quite a hard thing to get into and quite a lot of people think of it as a fairly elitist thing done as a blood sport. But it’s not like that and it’s a really important part of managing our habitats and if you didn’t manage deer there would be a welfare issue, since when populations are too high for the habitat you get higher winter mortalities due to starvation.”