live capture

swampy

Well-Known Member
has anyone been involved in a live capture scheme? How does it work? i help manage a park and it holds fallow and red. Seems a shame to go in there each year and just shoot 50% of them to keep numbers right.

swampy
 
Hi swampy. I have very recently been involved in live capture of red and sika and have learned quite alot. I won't bore the members with it but if you have any specifics you want to know by all means pm me.


Grant
 
Hi Grant,
I don't think you will bore anyone with your live catch exploits. I think that it would make very interesting reading.
 
To be honest b it was a f*****g disaster and I am still very irritated by the experience. I did a huge amount of research going in to it and feel extremely let down by what i saw. The fact remains that we all learn by our experiences, some good and some bad. I learned alot and would like to put that knowledge to use again at some point. I would like to think I could do at least as well and hopefully better than I experienced.

Grant
 
Good for you Grant. Yes I have felt that way myself at times. You get your hopes up and the excitment is building within you and then you watch some toss pot with little or no regard for what it is he is supposed to be an expert at make a pigs ear of it, and they still see no harm in their actions. Well you have learnt an important lesson and they are never cheap.
 
As you say good can sometimes come from bad and I will know better next time. I have however ended up with a fantastic looking red stag. His antlers are growing well and he has a wonderfully regal look about him. I dont know anything much about them, but he certainly looks a treat to me.

Grant
 
All is well that ends well then Grant. I bet your Stag will be a real sight to see come the rut! Even park deer look impressive in the rut. It always give me goose bumps when the Reds roar. :D
 
it would be easy enough to gat them into a small enclosure, but i can't imagine them volunteering to get into a stock trailer. I don't fancy wrestling a 140lb fallow buck into a trailer either. Maybe they could be darted and sedated whilst in the small enclosure then put in the trailer? or is this simply TV land stuff?

steve
 
No not at all, however it is certainly not straight forward. There are in essence two drugs that are used for the immobilisation of deer and one of them is NOT recommended for fallow. This leaves you with Rompun. One of the many things about the process that surprised me was the cost. It will cost you about £350 to buy one pack of Rompun and depending on body weight that will suffice for seven to ten animals. So the drugs alone are going to cost £35 to £50 an animal. Thats ok if you have no fatalities, but any you have merely increases the cost of the exercise. On top of this you have the cost of the operator of the dart gun. Rompun takes a good ten to twenty minutes to work and as a consequence the process of darting and moving just 5 fallow could take several hours and cost several hundred pounds.

Shall PM you as well.

Grant
 
Hi Swampy.

I have been involved with live capture of deer. I have watched Roe and C.W.D being netted out of a 3 acre wooded enclosure by so called professionals. A complete and utter disaster, 2 broken legs, 3 escapes and 4 succesfully captured, 1 of which died in transit.

In my opinion the best way to live capture deer is to dart them. There are several drugs which can be used, some of these are reversible so you can almost instantly bring the deer round. Some of these drugs noticibly Immobilon are bloody frightening to use, stick yourself with this stuff and its a major worry. Once darted deer can be moved into suitable trailers/boxes and transported.

Veterinary supervision is usually required if using Dangerous drugs. I have a Tranquilising rifle (and a vet for a wife !) If anyone needs any deer knocking down give me a shout. I would also be very interested in swoping Fallow and Red bloodlines from parks that I manage.

A very useful book for parkland deer is Management and Diseases of Deer ISBN 0 9510826 1 2. It contains a useful chapter on 'Restraint' !!!

Dont know where you are buying your Rompun from Grant but you seem to be paying about £300 too much for it !!

Sticks

Sticks
 
Hi Sticks,
What part of the country are you?
You have raised some interesting points.
Live capture of wild animals is always risky both for the animals and humans. Although in this case casualties are rather high. In an experienced capture team everyone must know their duties and react immediately something is going wrong.
If animals are darted and subsequently revived they must be monitored for at least 24 hours as immobilon can recirculate after reversal,with deer damaging themselves,walking aimlessly. Also they must be tagged as banned from the food chain. Not practical in wild deer.
Understated immobilon a worry. It is LETHAL. Over a dozen vets have committed suicide,one accidental death and one murder charge cleared on appeal. Definite protocol always load revivon in syringe for assistant to hold in event of accident then load immobilon. All darts on misses to be found.
As for dying in transit could have been shock or this peculiar syndrome , Capture Myopathy
 
I agree with the comments on Immobilon - it scares the hell out of me. And don't forget that, once a deer has been darted with the stuff, it can't ever enter the food chain. And I mean ever.

Live capture of any of the small deer species is fraught with problems. They break, or just die, so easily no matter how careful you are. Any kind of travel after capture is best avoided if at all possible - mortality rates in transit can be heartbreaking.
 
Hi , Rompum, a long time since i heard that, We used bottles of the stuff to get the velvet off the deer at home in the 1980s we started with 1ml and got down to .1 of a ml per red stag as long as it was in the dark, as you probably know daylight is the wake up serum,
I dont know what they use now as I left in 86
We did manage to move deer from one place to another very easily with out drugging them just build an appropriate race and load them onto an appropriate stock trailer or truck,
You dont allways have to shoot them or drug them to get them off your park,
when you say park, are they fenced in?? if so just let some out the gate to chance their arm in the wild!
good luck with Rompun!!
 
To be fair ive been involved in a lot of park catches, theres probably only 2 people in the country who i would rate at being an expert, and neither are members on this site
 
I would agree with that

I would disagree with that comment i know of a least a couple of people on here that are very capable live capture opperators. And as fair as calling people experts everybody learns something differant from every catch up !!! Everything is never clear cut
Dave (Jelen deer services )
 
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