In the Northern Hemisphere we all hope for a white Christmas, unfortunately for most of us in the UK we will be disappointed and our dreams of practising winter bushcraft and survival skills, like building a quinze, will be postponed for another year.
With or without snow though crisp, cold Autumn and Winter days are my favourite time to be outdoors but with or without snow it can sometimes be a challenge to get young people enthusiastic about being out of doors when the weather is cold. Here is one idea for you though;
Fungi all leave a spore print and these can be used in children art projects
All fungi produce spores, these are the equivalent of seeds in plants in that from those spores new fungi can develop although they are biologically very different. These spores can be used to produce very interesting pieces of art work with children. Spore prints can also be used to help identify fungi the colour of the spores varies just as much between species as the physical appearance of the fungi.
At this stage it is important to make that warning that should accompany any fungi foraging or activity that involves fungi, BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL, although you aren’t necessarily going to eat these fungi that doesn’t mean you can be any less careful. All fungi produce spores even poisonous ones and do you want your children handling poisonous species at all?
The safest approach with fungi is just not to touch species you aren’t 100% sure of.
The spore print from a bollete
Once you have picked some fungi you can arrange them carefully on paper or card that will show of the spore deposit best, you will need a few different colours of paper. The fungi we collected this time included some inedible species but nothing really poisonous. This variety allowed us to make some different patterns using the different colours of spores.
It won't take long to leave a spore print, a few minutes is often enough but if you leave it an hour or so, or potentially overnight you will get a darker print.
A tractor with field mushroom spore wheels
An excellent benefit of this activity and others which involve opportunities for children to work with natural materials gathered from the wild is the chance to help children engage with nature and the countryside environment around them.
This is one of the greatest benefits of practising Bushcraft with children, the hard core bushcraft skills can come later but it's the experiences of nature and the environment, an appreciation and general knowledge of local wildlife, imagination, self reliance and confidence that are the greatest benefits to young children.
Sorry it has taken a while for 2019's first instalment of the Bushcraft Education blog to hit the net but family time, deer stalking and a busy teaching schedule and a hectic last month of the shooting season has kept me very busy.
Family time at Christmas and New Years is important and has had to take precedence over blog writing recently.
Out deer stalking on New Years Day, rising earlier is a lot of peoples new years resolution, I've never had a problem with it as long as there is some stalking to do, traps to check or a good view to be had. These new years day outings have become a bit of a tradition for my Dad, brother and I and I was lucky enough the Sallie came with me on this outing too. Between us we got three Chinese Water Deer and saw the first sunrise of 2019 in person, which was far more spectacular than the fireworks just a few hours earlier.
After this brief absence though we are back and have some exciting things in store for 2019.
The first announcement we have is the launch of a new 'micro-blog', the foragers diary blog has been growing in popularity since I established it in 2016 so this year I decided to start another one dedicated to nature observation, it can be found at countrysidefieldnotes.blogspot.com and will feature regular updates from me and from other members of the bushcraft education team. It will be in a similar format to the foragers diary blog; short posts with pictures of our observations of nature and wildlife and the countryside management activities we are involved in.
The New Field Notes 'micro-blog'
I hope this new blog will be a success and that you enjoy it but I will also be closing one of the other micro-blogs. Geoff Bushcrafts was an attempt to show my daily practice of bushcraft skills in but I just haven't had time to make the most of it and so to concentrate on my other projects I will be closing that one down and instead of micro blog posts about the bushcraft skills I use on a daily basis I will spend a bit more time this year creating in depth articles and content for the bushcraft basics pages on this site and on getting some high quality posts prepared for the applied bushcraft series rather than the cursory mentions that it would get on the Geoff Bushcrafts micro blog. Also there are just times when snapping pictures and sending out a post just isn't appropriate so I wasn't posting any where near as often as I needed to to make that particular blog a success, so it will soon be taken offline. The content will remain there for a little while but in the next few weeks it ill be gone. Instead we will be putting a lot more practical and skills based bushcraft posts onto the main blog here to make up for it.
A post shared by Geoffrey Guy (@gguy_bushcrafteducation) on
Also the content on 'Geoff Bushcrafts' was often, if not always duplicated on my instagram account so you won't miss out on anything if you follow me on instagram.
Preparing a space for stacking timber and doing green woodwork when we start coppicing sweet chestnut
This is something you can look forward to this year though; a new lease of life for the applied bushcraft series, where we discuss topics such as traditional woodland management, wildlife management and other professions or pastimes which still require ye olde bushcraft skills. There will be some guest contributors to that series and I will be making a concerted effort to improve the bushcraft basics pages and will also provide links to my writing elsewhere on the web to broaden the selection of articles on bushcraft skills that you can reach through this blog.
Brexit is at the forefront of the news in the UK at the moment and given all the worry about it and the 'prepping' that some are doing to prepare for it is relevant to the Bushcraft and Survival in the News posts that I started last year. I had promised these posts monthly after the initial quarterly release proved popular but that was impossible to deliver at the time. I do intend to follow that pattern this year though and will release one on the last Friday of each month in addition to one that will appear this Friday featuring news from the last part of 2018 and the beginning of 2019.
As well as all this you can also look forward to the usual content with monthly posts on gear and foraging as well as a mix of educational and instructional posts on bushcraft, survival, traditional skills and outdoor learning.
Pictures from last years deer course at Kindrogan
Pictures from last years deer course at Kindrogan
There will also be some real life teaching to engage with as well as I will be delivering some courses for the Field Studies Council again this year. The Deer Ecology course at Kindrogan was popular and successful last year, all the participants were able to see wild red, roe and fallow deer and we also visited the Cairngorm Reindeer Centre. Due to circumstances beyond my control though this course will probably take place at Margham in South Wales this year although I hope to return to Kindrogan for future courses. Margham will be an excellent alternative venue though as they have a deer herd of red, fallow and most interestingly Pere David on site.
Pere David deer
I will also be delivering a bushcraft course for the FSC, probably at their Millport centre on Great Cambrae in the Firth of Clyde. As soon as possible I will post links here so you can book a place on those courses.
Have a great 2019 and I hope you enjoy what I have in store for you on the blog.
The difference between moorland managed for shooting on the right of the fence and grazed and denuded of heather and anything but grass on the left. (Image by Richard Guy)
Misunderstanding about the environment and about the work that goes on in the countryside abounds, often championed by well meaning individuals with the welfare of animals and the conservation of the natural world at heart but without the practical experience or appreciation of the relevance of wildlife management to accept that sometimes humans need to manage the environment rather than just let nature do it's own thing.
Mark Avery, former director of research for the RSPB published Inglorious in 2015 criticising grouse shooting and supporting his call for a ban on driven grouse shooting. While he does cite some very credible literature and does make some very good arguments against large scale driven grouse shooting he completely overlooks the benefits of land managed by game keepers.
I take a dim-view of 'celebrity environmentalists' like Chris Packham and Bill Oddie who should know better than to make some of the claims they do about grouse shooting and game keepers, although there are some in that industry who certainly do break laws and persecute wildlife the work of gamekeepers is still very important to the character of the British countryside. I do though have a little more sympathy with the kind of environmental 'miss-education' that can occur in schools.
'Environmental Education' is part of the curriculum in the form of topics such as climate change and sustainability and in a 2003 paper about environmental education in Australian National Parks *1 highlights the issue of teachers without the necessary understanding of the environment to deliver effective environmental education. The authors comment specifically that although teachers may have understood environmental issues from a social or cultural perspective they lacked a sound understanding of the ecological and management issues.
I have a similar concern having experienced first-hand the effects of misguided people who were concerned about the environment, they had certainly taken a position about the environment and were attempting to influence society which are two of the highest goals of environmental education but their position and action were informed, not by sound fact and local ecological knowledge, but by media and schools where the preoccupation seems to be to presenting global ecological and conservation issues without the context of local issues and badly informed teachers who will preach, rather than teach, about a specific, possibly emotional interest they have in the environment. To put this in context over my years of working in the countryside I have had traps and snares stolen or vandalised, valuable livestock released and been yelled at and verbally abused for cutting down trees and have been reported to the police for carrying out perfectly legal, necessary and beneficial environmental management activities.
Contrary to popular belief it is still legal to trap and snare many species of vermin and predatory mammals as well as some birds under the conditions of the General Licences as well as use snares which meet certain design criteria under the UK's laws. These traps fill a vital role in controlling species such as grey squirrel and mink but many dismiss them as illegal and cruel without any proper understanding of their role, function or the lengths which have been gone to to ensure modern traps are humane.
I do not believe that it is the role of teachers and environmental educators to address the issues or specific difficulties I have faced due to ‘environmental mis-education’ but there should be a responsibility to provide local context for peoples experiences in the environment rather than them forming perceptions of nature and the environment from TV documentaries of exotic animals, deforestation, global warming and other, very important, but very distant and intangible environmental issues.
If instead of using the easily accessible, celebrity endorsed, well marketed, neatly packaged but flawed examples of the negatives of wildlife and environmental management teachers were a bit more critical of the material they delivered and were willing and comfortable to step out of the school building onto a local farm, nature reserve, shooting estate, beach or hillside their students would see the day to day activities that go on out there and be able to relate to the climate and sustainability issues in their own community rather than form the opinion the cutting down trees is bad because deforestation in the Amazon is bad and that's all they have learned about at school.
Coppice management in a UK ancient woodland, a whole different kettle of fish to deforestation although tarred with the same brush in many peoples minds because they simply don't understand the difference.
While I don't expect everyone to suddenly start hunting and foraging their own food after a brush with the environment of their local area I do think that it will be much easier to have those conversations about where food comes from and why shooting and fishing are a legitimate and beneficial way of putting food on the table once people understand how the environment of their local area is maintained and managed.
My son mackerel fishing off the Dorset Coast
It's not only about food though or the rights and wrongs of killing something to eat but about respect for the people who make a living out of agriculture and countryside management and an understanding of the UK's unique landscape and countryside.
As bushcrafters you, and I say you because I am a deer stalker by trade and I train game keepers so to many I am one of the enemy when it comes to their opinions about wildlife and the environment. YOU have a unique opportunity to teach people about those things without being a direct part of an industry that many distrust and find distasteful and can do a great deal to educate people about their countryside.
References
*1 Lugg, A. & Slattery, D., (2003). Use of National Parks
for Outdoor Environmental Education: An Australian Case Study. Journal of
Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 3(1), pp. 77-92.
It will soon be Chinese water deer season so it's time to check and carry out maintenance on all our high seats. There are always seats to check, build and locate, the older
seats need checking for ageing, rusting, rotting or even malicious damage
because some people don’t understand what we do, how we do it or why and they
feel that damaging a seat is helping the deer and hope that someone tumbling
out of it is wildlife pay back.
Over the years, we have put in a lot of seats from purpose
built single seaters, purpose built two seaters and some homemade seats and
observation towers, improvised from stacking IBC frames and crates but all have
their place and can take a beating from the weather during the space of a year,
I even had one stolen!
Shooting from one of our two seat high seats
Today though, we just had to check security of the structures
and the seats and all was well, a little pruning and we are good for our first
outings of the season. We all know where we are going to be sitting on the
first day of the season and have a reasonable expectation of what we could see
but of course, the wildlife isn’t briefed, so it could do something completely
different! And that is the joy of it, it’s not a computer game, it’s not
predictable, it’s the application of skill and knowledge against an infinitely
variable set of circumstances, wind and weather, a tractor showing up
unexpectedly, a dog taking its owner for a walk or a particularly wary deer
spooked by a strange deer showing up on its patch.
We’re as ready as we can be but on the day, we are at the
mercy of so many factors out of our control and we may need to use all of our
skill and experience to overcome any challenges which may occur, the important
thing to remember is that a session in the high seat or foot stalking is to be
enjoyed not endured, I am as happy with a picture or a memory as I am carrying
out 20Kg of warm venison!
I have a theory which I believe is well founded enough to
share with you: birds make mistakes!
For as long as I can remember, the alarm calls of ‘angry
birds’ has been an extension of my own senses whilst sitting in a high seat, often
in low light conditions. I like to arrive early, very early and the hour
between arrival and having enough light to shoot, is enough time for anything
disturbed by my arrival, to settle down again.
In the dark, all of your non visual senses can appear to be
enhanced, hearing is the primary one but occasionally you will get a whiff of
fox too. You can hear the footfall of animals, the thrashing of antlers in
bushes and the call of every kind of wildlife, rabbits thumping, deer barking,
every kind of bird call and the staccato drumming of woodpeckers. My personal
favourites are owls and wood peckers.
Thrushes like blackbirds or this fieldfare are often very vocal and their alarm calls are a good sign that something is moving in the woods.
I have found the most useful to be Wrens, Robins and
Blackbirds. The very essence of these tactical accomplices, is that the birds
mistake small deer for foxes and therefore give them the same kind of verbal
abuse that they would a fox! Recently I was on an outing with a novice and was
able to explain the alarm calls of these little spies, the first chorus was
fairly high in the trees and fast moving, these were driving out an unwelcome
owl. The second however, was lower and slow moving as I suggested that these
may be concerned about a fox, which may actually be a small deer walking
through the undergrowth. My suggestion was spot on and a minute or two later a
little Muntjac trotted in to view and paused briefly to breakfast on a little
pile of wheat which I had strategically placed near the high seat.
Muntjac are often mistaken for foxes by humans and birds seem to be just as confused as we are sometimes.
Go ahead and team up with the ‘Angry Birds’ and see if you
agree!
Isn’t it amazing that despite the boast we often make as country folk that we are far more observant than ‘townies’ that we can often be tricked by the simplest things.
Is it a buck or a doe? It's standing on a rutting stand, so it might be a buck,but it's quite small and skinny so it might be a doe, you can't see any antlers though so what is it really?
One occasion I remember particularly clearly occurred many years ago, at the time I was a relatively inexperienced, but very enthusiastic, deer stalker I had woken well before dawn to get down to my chosen spot well before light to await the muntjac I was sure would be there. I quietly made my way through the ditches and along the hedgerows until I was at my chosen vantage point and waited. As the sky started to grow light I saw a shape, a slightly hunch backed, dark shape moving slowly from left to right at what I thought was about one hundred and fifty yards distant. I watched it intently through the binoculars waiting for there to be enough light to allow a safe shot at what I had convinced myself was a muntjac. I never took the shot though, when it became light enough to see what I was looking at it became clear that it want the 150 yard muntjac that I thought was there but a badger seventy five yards away. The combination of the darkness obliterating the colour and making it hard to judge range had me completely fooled for the best part of twenty minutes.
As well as showing just how easy it is to be thrown off by low light and less than ideal conditions this highlights a really important safety consideration. Scopes should not be used to identify quarry or targets. That’s what binoculars are for, while it might be common practice to use scopes to observe with, or to scan a potential target in military situations in the countryside good practice and plain common sense dictates that we don’t point our rifle at anything until you are sure it’s a muntjac not someone’s Alsatian or a fox and not just a pair of eyes that might just as easily belong to a Chinese water deer, badger or someone watching owls with night vision goggles.
I’m sure these mistakes don’t only happen when we have a weapon in our hands though, I remember several occasions when I have been watching deer without a rifle, either as part of a deliberate census or just to take a few pictures and I have been convinced that I have been watching a buck only for it to take a step and the tree branch that was behind it no longer looks like an antler and it’s suddenly a doe. I’ve also been stood behind a student who was taking part in a deer census as part of his practical studies towards a college qualification in game management who had not noticed a group of three young fallow bucks sitting amongst a patch of gorse because all that was visible was the top of their antlers which just looked like twigs. They were only forty yards in front of him but almost completely invisible until they stood up.
Amongst these does is a Busk with a broken antler, he blends in well, can you spot him?
While we do sometimes convince ourselves something is there because we want it to be, we want to see something that’s in season, or bigger and better than the last stag we shot or something unique in some way, that strange abstract shape becomes that massive buck, a bit like modern art I suppose. Sometimes though we aren’t seeing things and just get distracted by something even more awesome that we were looking for in the first place. This has happened to me plenty of times out in the countryside. On one occasion, out on a stalk I was walking alongside a drainage dyke, where I have often walked before, mostly concentrating on what was in the field to the side of the dyke I was suddenly distracted by a movement in the water, not a duck or a moorhen but a mammal, jumping to the conclusion that it was a mink I began to unsling my rifle only to see it joined by another, and another and it became clear that they were too large to be mink, I got out the binoculars and it became clear, three young otters, joined a second or two later by two adults from around the bend in the dyke. I was mesmerised, all thoughts of muntjac and venison forgotten I sat on the dyke bank for a good twenty minutes, totally still and captivated by these otters. I had seen otters before in the wild but never in a family group and had never expected to see them there. After a long time they moved off and I was released from whatever spell they had me under as I stood up I saw stood not more than fifteen or twenty yards behind me a muntjac buck stood still watching me, as I moved it ran off but I didn’t care. On another occasion I lost the best part of half a days work on a deer farm in New Zealand because I was watching kingfishers catching crabs in the estuary and smashing them open against a log when I should have been feeding the deer.
A New Zealand king fisher catching crabs.
So while I should probably not publicise how easily distracted I am to my current or future employers it’s great to work in the countryside where so many distractions can be found and where as long as we are safe a little bit of wishful thinking about the size of the buck we are looking at is absolutely fine.
Over the last few days I have been delivering a course on the ecology of British deer at the Field Studies Council'sKindrogan Field Centre . The centre lies close enough to the Cairngorms that we were able to visit the small population of reindeer there, the only reindeer to roam wild in the British Isles.
Reindeer were once native to the British Isles and while most agree that they became extinct here around 6-8000 years ago there are some records to suggest that they survived in Scotland much longer than that. There are some references to reindeer being hunted in Scotland in the Orkneyinga saga which documents some of the history of the Orkney Islands from their capture by the Norwegian king up to about 1200. In those texts it talks of reindeer and red deer being hunted in Scotland. This potentially means there were still reindeer in the British Isles up until the 1200's. Even if there were though it was only a few and the once massive population that would have migrated across prehistoric dogger land through modern day Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire before eventually making their way to the Peak District were long gone along with the Irish Elk, cave lion, woolly rhinoceros and other megafauna. Unlike the others though, Reindeer are the subject of one of the earliest success stories for re-wildling.
reindeer tracks
Despite their local extinction in the British Isles reindeer were still globally abundant and present throughout Northern Europe, Russia and North America. Although in Canada and the United States they are known as caribou rather than reindeer, they are exactly the same species: Rangifer tarandus.
In 1947 Mikel Utsi a native of Swedish Lapland, and his wife Ethel Lindgren-Utsi (a Cambridge trained anthropologist of Swedish descent), were visiting Aviemore and the Cairngorms and noticed that the habitats they saw resembled the reindeer grazing pastures of Northern Sweden. Utsi commented that the species he found, even down to the lichens, were similar. It was with this as his motivation that he brought seven of his reindeer from Sweden to Scotland on the 12th of April 1952 on the SS Sarek (Sarek is one of Sweden’s national parks). The two bulls and five cows were interned at Edinburgh Zoo in quarantine for twenty eight days before being allowed to venture further to their new home.
Over the next few years a further eighteen animals were shipped over from Sweden and a herd was established that has since grown to around one hundred and fifty individuals. Initially their grazing area was limited to allow the Forestry Commission to determine whether or not their grazing would affect conifer growth but they were gradually allowed more and more free range access and now graze freely over six thousand acres.
Tracking reindeer across the snow
While reindeer are not normally listed as one of the ‘wild’ deer species of the British Isles, the herd still requires lots of management and are technically someone’s property, they have not just been released and are still managed by their owners. It is clear though that the habitat they have become established in would support them should management cease. With all the talk of rewilding nowadays it’s nice to look back and see that there is a history of re-wilding success in the British Isles.
You can find more details of the Cairngorm reindeer herd HERE.
Reconnaissance isn’t just for the military, it’s for deer
managers and wildlife photographers and should be for everyone in my book, it’s
very therapeutic!
Camera collection is
a task which has to be done periodically, if I had my way, every child in the
land would have one of these instead of a Gameboy or X-box! We use it as a tool
to collect data on the wildlife in the area but what a fascinating way to learn
about the world around you. We put them in key positions, close to a game
trail, a hole in a fence or hedge (or even in my barn roof). It will tell us
what wildlife uses a particular trail and what time, so you can establish
patterns of use so that you can be in the right place at the right time. We
don’t always get what we expect either, on a high use deer trail, we get all
kinds of other things, like fox, badger, hare, rabbit, squirrel and even
smaller things like stoats, hedgehogs or rats, all making a guest appearance on
the camera.
This is just a small portion of the footage that we have taken in and around Riddy wood and other places we watch and manage the wildlife;
As a deer manager of course, it's the deer that get most of my attention but I love
the other species too, I just love being out there with nature all around me.
I know teachers shouldn't have favourite students but I do, my favourite students are my children. I love sharing bushcraft and the outdoors with them and I'm constantly thrilled by their fascination with nature and wildlife.
One thing they particularly enjoy is a bit of nature detective work, working out what is inside owl pellets is an exciting piece of detective work for them to undertake. I ran a workshop on owl pellet dissection for children at the Wilderness Gathering a few years, owl pellets are fascinating and dissecting them to see what they have been eating doesn't just satisfy idle curiosity but is a method used by ecologists to study small mammal populations. The contents of an owl pellet can reveal not only what an individual owl has been eating but the rough abundance of it's prey.
Although they get called owl pellets, pellets are not only produced by owls in fact a lot of birds produce them, certainly all birds of prey produce them and so do corvids. Just as cats produce hair balls as the indigestible fur they collect when they clean themselves is coughed back up birds of prey do the same, the hair, bones, teeth and other indigestible parts of their prey are coughed back up in compacted pellets. Typically we think of these pellets as compacted masses of hair and bones but jackdaw pellets are often just lumps of seed husks and beetle shells, little owls eat lots of beetles too and their pellets are often made up largely of beetle shells.
Short eared owl pellets are particularly large. You can see the bones and hair of it's prey here and a fragment of a voles jaw bone identifies at least one of it's recent meals.
Teeth are particularly useful when it comes to identifying the contents of an owl pellet and the children love spotting the tell tale colours and patterns that help them identify what little mammals the owls have been eating.
The broad skulls and 'zig zag' patterns of voles teeth give them away while the narrow pointy muzzles of shrews and their pointed red teeth make them obvious, a bit of judgement and a keen eye is required to tell the difference between, water, common and pygmy shrews. Their teeth really are red too, all the mainland UK shrews have red teeth, also as carnivores their teeth are pointed to deal with their insect diet. All the skulls above came out of the same barn owl pellet, barn owl pellets rarely contain mouse remains, as their diet is based largely on shrews and voles.
I've always found that children are fascinated by owl pellets, my children certainly love dismantling them and investigating the contents. They have got very good at spotting what species of mammals the owl has been eating and even at what part of the animal the bones they find come from.
The worksheet from our owl pellet dissection workshops allows the children to catalogue and identify what they have found in their owl pellets.
If you ever happen to find an owl roost you will have a ready supply of pellets gate and fence posts are a good place to start for barn owls while the others are a little less predictable. Give it a go though, the looks of disgust from children as they decide whether they are looking at owl poo or owl sick are worth it.
To write about scenes from a high seat, first they have to
be installed! Well before the season started some like-minded friends and I went
to the farm and installed some high seats, these were mounted 8 to 10 feet
above the ground and usually secured to a nice solid tree and access gained via
an integral ladder. The purposes are multiple but primarily to facilitate
observation over a wider field of view than would be possible from ground level
and second, to permit the bullet to go downwards harmlessly into the ground
after it has passed through the target or, heaven forbid, if you should miss!
The location of the seat is decided based upon multiple
observations during the closed season, how many deer have been spotted in an
area which can be overseen by the seat, is it safe, away from public access and
is there a tree to attach it to. The locations for the 2 seats we set up
pre-season had been carefully considered
based on the points above.
The first was placed against a big old oak tree, slightly
withered by a lightning strike at some time in its history. The size of tree
and softness of the ground required some ingenuity to get it rock solid but we
got there in the end, aided by a ratchet strap for further solidity, a chain
and padlock for security and a little pruning to improve the view! Job done.
On our way to the next tree we saw a big old buck Chinese
Water Deer standing defiantly and looking at us all in turn, in a couple of
weeks, such a defiant posture at such close range will have him in the freezer
but all we could do was watch and smile!
Murphy’s Law is alive and well in the countryside as we
found out on arrival at tree 2! We found that there was something already
living in it, a wasp nest deep in the tree had a continual stream of busy and
threatening looking workers entering and leaving through a hole where a small
branch had rotted off. None of us felt like sharing, so we found an alternative
tree close by!
Always good to have a plan B! Whatever plan you’re on, enjoy
it!
Another regular series that is being resurrected here on the Bushcraft Education Blog is Martins regular 'from the highseat' series where he shares his latest encounters with wildlife as he goes about hes deer management work and other outdoor excursions. We hope you enjoy todays instalment and you can expect regular updates on a monthly basis.
We start the year with a reminder that there is always something out there worth seeing in the countryside and some of Martins rules for 'doing it right' when it comes to deer stalking.
My work as a deer manager takes me along hedgerows and ditches, through woods and scrub and I know pretty much what can be found and where at any time of the year. I see the trees blossom and come into fruit, I watch them ripen and I take some home. My quest may be a deer but I am happy to come home with a rucksack full of apples, plums or cherries, a photograph or a memory, hunting is a journey not a destination, the secret is to enjoy the outing, not the outcome and I do.
Until November, hardier crops such as Apples, Crab Apples and Sloes are still on some of the trees and ready to eat or be converted into Jellies and sauces for the meat crops which come during our peak deer season. I love fruit sauces with meat and Bambi and Cranberry is my favourite roast! But sadly the Elder Flower cordial from the summer is long gone and the blackberries are already in jam or been eaten in pies.
a haul of blackberries and rosehips picked opportunistically while out looking for deer.
It saddens me that people think that all a deer manager does is kill deer because it is a whole lot more complicated and involved than that and it starts with many miles of walking, interspersed with picking fruit and watching birds in my case!
First of all we need to know what species we have on the land (we have three, Roe, Muntjac and Chinese Water Deer) then we need to know how many and where they are, how many we need to take out during the season to maintain a healthy and sustainable population but which won’t cause too much damage to crops. A happy farmer is the key to coming back and doing this each year, it is a privilege not a right and it has to be done right!
Doing it right means:
· Doing it safely! Safety will always be the top priority, we have to share the countryside with everyone and our presence cannot impact on their safety or enjoyment of the environment.
· Safety is closely followed by humanity, if we have identified a poorly looking animal, taking this one will be our top priority, one with a limp is the most obvious and common sign of something being amiss and only a close inspection will reveal the cause. The most common cause is old age and/or bad feet, arthritic joints, and overgrown feet are common place, encounters with agricultural equipment can be a factor although many of those are fatalities during the harvest, where young animals just sit tight until it’s too late to flee. Fighting and road traffic collisions are other causes and just occasionally, a deer peppered with bird shot, where someone has exercised poor judgement.
· With all of these other factors in place, marksmanship, stealth and an understanding of the weather (wind in particular will betray your presence) all add up to a unique experience.
practising regularly is important if you plan to humanely and safely harvest deer or other wildlife from the countryside.
· I believe that one of the greatest obligations on me and anyone who engages in any form of ‘meat harvest’, is to ensure that there is no waste, or at least the very least possible.
· Finally, leave the countryside devoid of evidence that a deer or I was ever there.
For someone who knows and loves the countryside, there is always something to eat, something to watch and a myriad of things to appreciate, from a sunrise to a sunset, from a fruit bush to a mushroom patch, a pigeon pie or a venison steak.
Wrap up warm and get out there soon, you will never regret it!
You know that excited knot you get in your stomach before something really exciting? I felt that this week.
What was I doing? I was minutes away from ticking off something that's been on my bucket list for years. I thought I'd have to make a special trip - maybe to Scotland - to tick this one off so had ruled it out for some time much later. But...
On Sunday I got a tip off from a friend that at a weir on the Derbyshire / Staffordshire border Salmon were leaping. Bearing in mind that its hard to get much further from the coast in the UK I hadn't even thought to check that this spectacle would be available to witness just 30 minutes drive from my house. Needless to say I didn't need to be told twice and immediately made plans to get over there as soon as possible. Two days later that I was walking the short river side footpath up to the weir; that was when 'the knot' arrived.
This was the view that greeted me as I made my way down the bank of the River Dove. Although I knew the Salmon (and Sea Trout too) had been seen a few days before we had also had a few days of torrential rainfall. I was expecting the water level to have risen, and I wasn't sure how this would have affected the behaviour of the fish. I needn't have worried as it turned out, they were still very busy.
Just seconds after I approached the weir itself a massive Salmon leaped clear - box ticked, but I wasn't going anywhere! A few of the people there (word had got out, in fact I was relatively late to the party!) mentioned that when they had been a few days before, with lower water levels, the fish had been leaping more.
While the fish were leaping there wasn't a lot of succeeding going on - none in fact. No-one I spoke to had seen one make it, and if you take a look at the picture above you can just about see a steep step right at the top of the weir. I'm not a fish expert by any means, but I would be amazed if any fish could make it up and over that last seemingly insurmountable obstacle, especially with the water running as fast and as high as it was while I was there.
I allowed myself the luxury of just watching for a while, I've missed too many natural spectacles by trying to get them on camera. Also when I first arrived there was a bit of queue for the good spots so I initially had to watch through a small screen of trees, leafless of course at this time of year so I could still see well enough but it would have been pointless with a camera. I never kept track, despite having intentions to do so, but I would say there was a leap or at least some visible activity every 2 minutes or less, with occasional flurries of activity which drew excited calls and cheers from the observers.
Trying to describe the leaping itself is a bit of a non-event, it really is something you have to see to capture the magic. If I told you I stood for two hours by a river bank on a grey November day and watched fish of varying sizes jumping about and failing to get to their destination, you might think I had a very dull life for that to be a better option... but it was thrilling. Better than the cinema any day, and the tickets are cheaper!
The suspense is tangible, you never know exactly what's going to break the surface next, or where, or when! You can't be sure whether it will be a tiddler 40 yards away in the shadow on the other side of the river or something like this...
Now I wasn't there to take photo's - I was there to watch, but I wanted to make some record of breaking my Salmon duck, if you get what I mean. When I initially set the camera up I just left it on a tripod videoing so I could watch without being distracted. Later I attached a remote release and set it to continuous shooting so I could trigger the camera without having to have my hand on the shutter button. It was just a few minutes after I changed to this mode that this monster leaped just in front of me. I'm guestimating but this fish has got to be more than 2 feet clear of the water at the highest point of its arc.
Still images just doesn't convey the power of these fish or what they are achieving here. Even the video's don't quite do it justice. I've managed to condense over an hour of footage down into just a few minutes.
While the fish stole the show, the river wasn't entirely devoid of other natural interest, although not exactly teeming either. Not long after I arrived a pair of mute swans winged their majestic way over the weir and down stream, their loud wing beats clearly audible even over the rushing water. Later a Kingfisher whirred down stream looking for all the world like someone had put it on fast forward, they are so fast aren't they! Its brilliant blue wasn't looking at its best but I suspect this was mostly to do with the light on the day, which was, to be kind, soft - it was pretty grey and miserable to be honest, but as no rain fell I refuse to complain.
Eventually I had to call it a day and get home and get on with some work. I'll try and get back before the run finishes - just because it's ticked off my bucket list doesn't mean I won't make the most of this awesome (in the true sense of the word) natural spectacle so close to home again.
