Grumpy, I am not, but look at things through Rose tinted glasses. I also do not!
If people spent more time in the field actually doing the job instead of putting useless information on a piece of paper, maybe they would be less deer running around this country!
To most of the landowner is in the UK dead deer mean jobs being done not crap pieces of paper you can put a whole world of information on paper doesn’t mean you’ve done the job, and I wonder at the end of each year how many people fudged their figures to make it look good Just to keep their stalking I bet, I’ll wager a heap!
And as for
@Mungo ta ta your going on my growing list of time wasters
Perhaps we could all simply accept that landowners are different in what they expect from whomever they employ to do the stalking, and at the end of the day they are the ones who set the terms.
Every stalker has a choice - no-one forces them to take on more ground, and if they don't want to do the stalking based on the terms imposed by the landowner they can simply move on and try and find stalking elsewhere.
There are plenty of farmers around who are happy to do everything on a handshake, and I've had several of these type of leases over the years, However there are others for whom deer management is part of a broader strategy on how the farm or estate is run. As explained above, in situations where someone is claiming grants such as the Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier they are required to have a Deer Management Plan in place. This puts a certain level of administration on whoever is doing the stalking, as otherwise the grant application won't be accepted and/or grant money that has been paid out will be reclaimed. So whilst you might see this type of administration as "crap pieces of paper", for the farmer or landowner it can mean getting grants or not.
For the stalker, these kind of records can also provide invaluable data, not just when coming up with the deer management plan but also when dealing with those who might have an interest in the estate - whether that's the farmers, foresters, estate managers, conservationists, NGO's, the general public or whoever.
The simple fact is that there is pressure on deer management to become more professional - whether that's through training, data management or interacting with other land users. We may not like it, and we might hark back to the days when everything was simpler, but the reality is that times have moved on.
As an example, I received another enquiry the other day through the BASC Competent Stalkers register offering stalking for fallow, roe and muntjac on 6 sites totalling nearly 170 hectares, run by the Woodland Trust. The details made clear that cull numbers were dependent on the Deer Management Plan, and payments were being made available for both site visits and carcasses. The details also mentioned that "There is a requirement to use the Woodland Trust application to record all culls". If a stalker can't be ar5ed with all the administration this requires, they don't have to bid, but for those who accept that these type of leases increasingly require them to show as much professionalism in deer management as in deer culling, they can go for the opportunity.
The deer stalking world should be big enough to allow both approaches to exist side-by-side, and accept that there are simply different ways of doing things.