smengal
Active Member
Dear all,
First of all, apologies as this is a long one.
firstlightdeer.co.uk
Some of you will know about the First Light app I shared here last month. It originally started as a hobby build, something I wanted for myself, and I only posted it here to see whether it might be useful to anyone else.
The response to v1 was bigger than I expected, and more importantly the feedback from people actually using it in the field made it obvious it needed doing properly. So v2.0 is a complete rewrite. No cartoons, no gimmicks, just a serious, practical tool aimed at being genuinely useful for UK deer management.
It’s a web app rather than something from the app store. You just open the link, no install, and it runs on iPhone, Android, tablet, laptop, anything with a browser. If you add it to your home screen from Safari or Chrome it behaves like a normal app and works offline in the field.
There are no ads, no subscriptions, no tracking, and no data selling. I built it because I didn’t want to be the product. There’s no Facebook pixel, no analytics, no ad networks, none of that. It’s free and it’s staying free.
I’ve been asked quite a lot why it’s free and what the catch is. There isn’t one. I do fairly well in my career and charging for it wouldn’t meaningfully change my life, whereas what I got from v1, feedback, bug reports, and a few real friendships with stalkers who used it, mattered far more. I’ve done well here, and I wanted to give something back to the country and to a community that’s given me a lot over the years. This is just my small way of doing that. That said, if anyone feels like repaying me with a stalking invite, a syndicate place, or a land permission, I wouldn’t refuse
Currently I’m covering some of the costs myself. However, there will come a point where server and running costs won’t be sustainable long‑term and some form of sponsorship will be needed. Ideally that should be from organisations like BASC or BDS, so if anyone has any contacts and wouldn’t mind putting in a good word, it would help keep the app around for the long run for all of us.
What is in the app:
The biggest addition in v2 is the Cull Diary. It’s cloud‑synced but works fully offline, including photos, and syncs when you’re back in signal. You can record species, sex, age class, date and time, location pinned on a map, ground, calibre, shot distance and placement, carcass (larder) weight, destination, tag number, shooter, gralloch abnormalities such as fluke, TB‑style lung lesions and condition issues, plus free text, a photo, and notes. When you save an entry the app automatically pulls in the actual weather at your shot location and time and stores it with the record.
There’s a stats section that shows totals, kg of venison, species and sex breakdowns, sex ratios, age classes, calibres with average distances, shot distance bands, grounds, shooters, destinations, time‑of‑day patterns, monthly spread, and year‑on‑year trends. There’s also a map view with every cull pinned and clustered, filterable by species, season, or ground.
You can set cull targets per species and sex, either overall or per ground, and see progress update automatically as you enter culls.
Syndicates are supported as well. You can create or join one via a private link. They can be run either as a shared pool or with individual allocations set by a manager. Entries recorded against shared ground count toward syndicate totals automatically, while your personal diary stays private. Syndicate exports include season summaries, shared larder books, and per‑member breakdowns.
Once culls are recorded, exports are one‑click: full season diary PDFs, larder books, per‑carcass one‑pagers, UK trained‑hunter declarations for game dealers (pre‑filled), consignment declarations for multiple carcasses, season summaries for landowners, and raw CSV data.
Deer School is also new. It’s a DSC1 study and mock exam tool so you don’t have to pay silly money just to practice. There are hundreds of questions across biology, identification, disease and management, firearms and safety, law and ethics, and fieldcraft. You can do quick quizzes, timed mock exams, or drill a specific topic. Every question explains why an answer is right or wrong, not just whether it is. It’s useful for DSC1 prep, DSC2 portfolio refresh, or just keeping knowledge sharp.
The weather and deer activity side has been expanded as well. There’s now a 7‑day forecast with full hourly breakdowns including temperature, feels‑like, wind and gusts, sky conditions, rain chance and precipitation. Legal shooting times are shown for each day, and there’s a date picker so you can check legal times for any future date at your chosen location.
The deer activity forecast combines time of day, moon phase and solunar periods, rut timing by species, seasonal body condition, temperature and pressure trends, wind, cloud cover, frost detection, and post‑rain movement. You can see which day this week looks best and then drill down to see exactly which hours inside that day are likely to be worth being out.
All six UK deer species are covered with photo galleries, identification notes that actually work at distance, habitat and behaviour, rut timing, UK distribution including hybrid warnings, practical stalking notes, and venison quality by month. Season badges reflect England, Wales, and Scotland, including the 2023 Scottish close‑season changes.
There’s also a much‑expanded Field Guide, which is really the full UK stalking reference written out properly. It covers safety, rifle and optic setup, legal minimums, calibre notes, identification and confusion pitfalls, shot placement with anatomical diagrams, CIC trophy measurement, after‑the‑shot procedures, larder handling, notifiable diseases with APHA contacts, rut behaviour and safety, welfare principles, and DSC information.
On privacy, your diary is yours. Data is stored securely, only you can read your entries, and nothing is sold or shared. Location data only leaves your device when you choose to save an entry. If you delete your account, your data goes with it. Syndicate managers only see entries you record against that syndicate and nothing else.
I’m the only person working on this, so if something breaks or you’ve got an idea, message me here, in‑app, or at firstlightdeer@gmail.com. I do read and reply. v2.0 is a big release, so expect the odd rough edge. I’ll patch things as they come up.
Hope it’s of use. Happy to answer any questions.
First of all, apologies as this is a long one.
First Light — UK Deer Stalking Guide
The complete UK deer stalking companion — legal hours, cull diary, Deer School, season dates for all 6 species, deer activity forecast and field guide.
firstlightdeer.co.uk
Some of you will know about the First Light app I shared here last month. It originally started as a hobby build, something I wanted for myself, and I only posted it here to see whether it might be useful to anyone else.
The response to v1 was bigger than I expected, and more importantly the feedback from people actually using it in the field made it obvious it needed doing properly. So v2.0 is a complete rewrite. No cartoons, no gimmicks, just a serious, practical tool aimed at being genuinely useful for UK deer management.
It’s a web app rather than something from the app store. You just open the link, no install, and it runs on iPhone, Android, tablet, laptop, anything with a browser. If you add it to your home screen from Safari or Chrome it behaves like a normal app and works offline in the field.
There are no ads, no subscriptions, no tracking, and no data selling. I built it because I didn’t want to be the product. There’s no Facebook pixel, no analytics, no ad networks, none of that. It’s free and it’s staying free.
I’ve been asked quite a lot why it’s free and what the catch is. There isn’t one. I do fairly well in my career and charging for it wouldn’t meaningfully change my life, whereas what I got from v1, feedback, bug reports, and a few real friendships with stalkers who used it, mattered far more. I’ve done well here, and I wanted to give something back to the country and to a community that’s given me a lot over the years. This is just my small way of doing that. That said, if anyone feels like repaying me with a stalking invite, a syndicate place, or a land permission, I wouldn’t refuse
Currently I’m covering some of the costs myself. However, there will come a point where server and running costs won’t be sustainable long‑term and some form of sponsorship will be needed. Ideally that should be from organisations like BASC or BDS, so if anyone has any contacts and wouldn’t mind putting in a good word, it would help keep the app around for the long run for all of us.
What is in the app:
The biggest addition in v2 is the Cull Diary. It’s cloud‑synced but works fully offline, including photos, and syncs when you’re back in signal. You can record species, sex, age class, date and time, location pinned on a map, ground, calibre, shot distance and placement, carcass (larder) weight, destination, tag number, shooter, gralloch abnormalities such as fluke, TB‑style lung lesions and condition issues, plus free text, a photo, and notes. When you save an entry the app automatically pulls in the actual weather at your shot location and time and stores it with the record.
There’s a stats section that shows totals, kg of venison, species and sex breakdowns, sex ratios, age classes, calibres with average distances, shot distance bands, grounds, shooters, destinations, time‑of‑day patterns, monthly spread, and year‑on‑year trends. There’s also a map view with every cull pinned and clustered, filterable by species, season, or ground.
You can set cull targets per species and sex, either overall or per ground, and see progress update automatically as you enter culls.
Syndicates are supported as well. You can create or join one via a private link. They can be run either as a shared pool or with individual allocations set by a manager. Entries recorded against shared ground count toward syndicate totals automatically, while your personal diary stays private. Syndicate exports include season summaries, shared larder books, and per‑member breakdowns.
Once culls are recorded, exports are one‑click: full season diary PDFs, larder books, per‑carcass one‑pagers, UK trained‑hunter declarations for game dealers (pre‑filled), consignment declarations for multiple carcasses, season summaries for landowners, and raw CSV data.
Deer School is also new. It’s a DSC1 study and mock exam tool so you don’t have to pay silly money just to practice. There are hundreds of questions across biology, identification, disease and management, firearms and safety, law and ethics, and fieldcraft. You can do quick quizzes, timed mock exams, or drill a specific topic. Every question explains why an answer is right or wrong, not just whether it is. It’s useful for DSC1 prep, DSC2 portfolio refresh, or just keeping knowledge sharp.
The weather and deer activity side has been expanded as well. There’s now a 7‑day forecast with full hourly breakdowns including temperature, feels‑like, wind and gusts, sky conditions, rain chance and precipitation. Legal shooting times are shown for each day, and there’s a date picker so you can check legal times for any future date at your chosen location.
The deer activity forecast combines time of day, moon phase and solunar periods, rut timing by species, seasonal body condition, temperature and pressure trends, wind, cloud cover, frost detection, and post‑rain movement. You can see which day this week looks best and then drill down to see exactly which hours inside that day are likely to be worth being out.
All six UK deer species are covered with photo galleries, identification notes that actually work at distance, habitat and behaviour, rut timing, UK distribution including hybrid warnings, practical stalking notes, and venison quality by month. Season badges reflect England, Wales, and Scotland, including the 2023 Scottish close‑season changes.
There’s also a much‑expanded Field Guide, which is really the full UK stalking reference written out properly. It covers safety, rifle and optic setup, legal minimums, calibre notes, identification and confusion pitfalls, shot placement with anatomical diagrams, CIC trophy measurement, after‑the‑shot procedures, larder handling, notifiable diseases with APHA contacts, rut behaviour and safety, welfare principles, and DSC information.
On privacy, your diary is yours. Data is stored securely, only you can read your entries, and nothing is sold or shared. Location data only leaves your device when you choose to save an entry. If you delete your account, your data goes with it. Syndicate managers only see entries you record against that syndicate and nothing else.
I’m the only person working on this, so if something breaks or you’ve got an idea, message me here, in‑app, or at firstlightdeer@gmail.com. I do read and reply. v2.0 is a big release, so expect the odd rough edge. I’ll patch things as they come up.
Hope it’s of use. Happy to answer any questions.
. 
Next week I am supposed to be going part time but it looks like I’m already going to have to cover for someone who has gone sick… 
