Deer in Scotland: a way forward?

The great English ecologist Oliver Rackham once said that “tree planting is not synonymous with conservation; it is an admission that conservation has failed”.

When I told my oldest friends I was starting a new role at the Woodland Trust last year, one of them teased “do we really need to plant trees? Don’t they just grow themselves?” He was joking of course but it’s worth reminding ourselves of one of the main reasons why, so often in Scotland, trees and woods aren’t able to regenerate themselves: deer numbers.

Red deer and roe deer are native to Scotland, and are an important part of the ecosystem, browsing plants and woods and creating diverse, species-rich habitats. They’ve been around since the end of the Ice Age, when Scotland was colonised with sprawling native woodlands, and wolves and lynx – now long gone – roamed as apex predators. The problem isn’t that we have deer in Scotland – it’s that their numbers are now unnaturally high.

There are around a million deer in Scotland. To put that in context, it’s double what we had in 1990.* Most of them are native red and roe, but we also now have introduced sika and fallow deer, and a threat of non-native muntjac expanding into Scotland from England.

The pressure these numbers put on our fragile ecosystems is enormous. They have no natural predators anymore, and if we continue to do what we’ve been doing in recent years, numbers could continue to rise and cause untold damage to natural regeneration of woods and tree planting projects alike. And it’s not in the interests of these graceful animals to have unsustainably high populations either – many find themselves undernourished and starving in harsh Scottish winters because of a lack of food, damaging peatlands and farms, and increasingly being involved in collisions with vehicles.

To take an example of one vulnerable habitat, Scotland’s rainforest has been identified by the Scottish Government as a high priority for restoration, and government has committed to restoring and expanding the rainforest as a natural solution to the climate emergency. However, currently, the rainforest is suffering from the impacts of high deer numbers. This includes the Woodland Trust Scotland site Gleann Shìldeag, where the surviving fragment of rainforest remains unable to regenerate naturally and which we are supporting through extensive tree planting. More than 40% of rainforest sites have levels of grazing that are so high, it is limiting their long-term survival. Around 80% of the grazing impact is from deer.**

Until now, our main approach to deer in Scotland has been to mitigate their impacts. We build deer fences around woodland – whether it’s planted or naturally regenerating – and install protective tubes. But fences are expensive and not suitable for all sites, and woodland grant funding is drying up fast. Scotland’s Forestry Grant Scheme just took a 41% cut, for example, worth £32 million. And for obvious reasons, everyone now knows much better than to litter the countryside with protective plastic tubes whenever we can avoid it.

According to the Scottish Government, its agencies spent just under £9 million of public money in 2022-23 on deer management activity, “including culling, provision of fencing, deer larders and other equipment”.*** We can only guess that the cost to landowners, be they communities, estates, or charities, would be much higher. For many, the cost of mitigating deer impacts effectively is too dear – especially when carried out at scale – so new woodland isn’t created, and existing woodland has its saplings munched before they get a chance to grow.

Culling deer is an emotive topic, especially for a generation whose childhood involved watching the Disney classic, Bambi. But humane and evidence-based culling is a necessary part of deer management, and when other management techniques become unaffordable or impractical, we may well need to see more culling. Culling opens countless new opportunities – for jobs, skills development, and a whole supply chain around venison – a nutritious, plentiful source of red meat. But there are barriers to getting venison into the market.

The Scottish Government’s recent consultation – Managing Deer for Climate and Nature – contained a raft of positive proposals, including on venison. It suggests dropping the requirement for a Venison Dealer’s Licence and subjecting venison to the same regulatory procedure as other game products. On the Woodland Trust Scotland’s Glen Finglas estate, the existing rules prevent us from supplying venison locally to the community. We are aware of other landholdings in Scotland where this is equally the case. We think these barriers are unnecessary and that local venison should reach local people at affordable prices, and we support the Government’s proposal to remove that barrier.

Land managers should be encouraged, supported and incentivised to bring down deer numbers on their landholdings in an evidence-led way, and in partnership with others. That work needs to happen at landscape-scale as well, since deer travel; it could be a waste of time and money trying to control deer in one small patch of land if your neighbours are not. That’s why Deer Management Groups exist, and there are lots of great initiatives where that is working really well.

But the outcomes nationally make it obvious that that is still not enough. So, we fully support the creation of Deer Management Nature Restoration Orders, proposed in the consultation, where government agencies can intervene in places those initiatives are failing, subject to a clear and proportionate threshold for intervention.

Scotland has an excessively high deer population now because of our decisions over the past 30 years, wherein deer numbers have doubled. But the problem goes back further to Victorian notions of what the Scottish countryside is, and how it should be managed – and indeed even further back than that when deer predators were wiped out through the centuries by human activity. It’s clear something needs to change. We need to be bolder and more radical in Scotland when it comes to deer control, and we need changes rooted in partnership and cooperation with land managers of all types, be they private, community, government, or eNGOs. This is about animal welfare as well as allowing nature to heal itself for the benefit of biodiversity, climate and people.

Scotland must welcome responsible land management, and its practitioners – gamekeepers, stalkers, farmers, estate managers, government officials and communities – and use both the carrot and the stick to drive further progress in deer management.

* Managing deer numbers for nature and climate - gov.scot

** Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforest

*** Written question and answer: S6W-19864 | Scottish Parliament Website