Close encounters of the grisly kind

AnotherLife: On a glorious early morning a few winters back, swooping down the mountain road to Maam Cross, we came up with a red deer stag, with a hind at his shoulder, poised on a golden hummock of bog as if waiting for Landseer with his easel.

It was a close encounter of a magical, one-off kind, demanding explanation. Red deer have not roamed free in Connemara since the days of Roderic O'Flaherty.

Well, that's almost true. There's now a small "outlaw" population, founded by a few early escapes from the Connemara National Park - native reds, relocated from Killarney National Park - and later, in the 1990s, from a private herd in the Maam Cross area. This shadowy cohort has been moving east towards Lough Corrib, with Coillte's conifers as refuge.

In Kerry, the remnant herd of protected native reds has increased from just 110 animals in 1970 to about 1,000 today, spreading out through the mountains and into Co Cork. Along with the smaller Japanese sika deer, they are blamed for road accidents and injuries, prompting predictable demands for a cull. Most widespread of all, and flourishing especially in the midlands and north, are the fallow deer, staple game of Anglo-Norman deer parks and now invaders of broadleaf plantations and agricultural crops.

The swelling population of wild deer - all of them, even the "native" reds, originally introduced - is felt to present real problems. In the early 1990s there were deer in only six counties of the Republic; now they are present in all, and throughout Northern Ireland as well. Some 2,200 hunters are licensed annually and cull about 10,000 deer, half of them in Co Wicklow, where most are hybrid crosses of introduced reds and sikas.

Densities here have reached 25 per sq km, and the animals have spread rapidly across south Leinster, sifting through the interconnecting forests.

The human and financial cost of road accidents caused by deer merely adds to the long-standing bill for the animals' browsing of young trees and bark-stripping in the forests. While this remained economically tolerable it was largely absorbed by the State, its level controlled by culls carried out by experienced stalkers. But as deer numbers have grown, sometimes exponentially, and forestry has moved into private hands, damage to both conifers and broadleaves has brought demands for closer management, proper censuses, and more expert stalkers, professional or not.

One result is a Stalker Training Manual just launched by the Deer Alliance, an umbrella group of deer interests, and written by veteran stalkers Liam Nolan and James Walsh of the Wicklow Deer Group. It is meant to serve a training and qualification programme developed by the Alliance after Coillte sought independent standards for the hunters licensed to shoot on its land. The National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Forest Service have also been part of the project.

A stalker training programme is bound to have its grisly bits - rifle ballistics and aiming points, how to follow blood trails, best hunting knives for gralloching, and the rest. And if culling is to limit numbers, it has to work with population dynamics. Stags may make the most impressive targets but they are almost incidental to the size of population: it is the fecund females that set numbers rising exponentially. Left alone with a stag, a herd of 20 adult females will multiply to 161 animals in five years.

While culling old and sick deer is the obvious first choice, shooting pregnant females and hinds with their calves ("shoot the calf first") can also be vital to the equation.

Is there really no other way of limiting numbers? In England, where six species of deer, including the native roe, have also been rising rapidly, a yearly road accident bill of some £10 million (€14.6 million) - and too many human deaths - has accentuated government concern and brought wide consultation on "sustainable management".

Even the august Mammal Society reluctantly accepts the arguments for culling, while suggesting that reintroducing the lynx as a natural predator might help curb the smaller deer species, such as muntjac and the UK's native roe. Any promise of immuno-contraception is clearly well in the future.

Along with biological profiles of the Irish species, the Deer Alliance manual sets out the essential choices in management. Trying to reduce deer to levels with little or no impact on forestry is seen as rarely practical or possible, and "also questionable ethically on the ground of woodland biodiversity". Increasing the natural food supply by leaving unplanted glades and stream edges, and reducing deer numbers to avoid serious damage is the favoured compromise.

"You need never apologise," the manual tells would-be stalkers who may meet uncomprehending strollers in the woods - but it might be as well to explain.

The Stalker Training Manual is available for 25, plus 3 p&p, from the Deer Alliance HCAP Assessment Committee, PO Box 10, Bray, Co Wicklow