How old do you think this buck is (was)

[SDSRoe]

Of course the alternative is just to take down is brown approach - shoot anything on sight. And in five years time when nothing is there, walk away.

Ye this is exactly what I don’t want to happen, I’ll get reading some more and make sure to take the responsible decisions, thanks for the book recommendation, I do appreciate that, is there any of his books you would recommend to start on?

 

[Freeforester]

Ye this is exactly what I don’t want to happen, I’ll get reading some more and make sure to take the responsible decisions, thanks for the book recommendation, I do appreciate that, is there any of his books you would recommend to start on?

Dominic Griffith produced a good book on management of roe deer in the UK. Auf der reh/apropos du chevreuil by Albrecht von Bayern is a great work but only available in German or French language. There are others, but remember that you can only kill them but once, and that tall oaks from little acorns grow, and you will lose young bucks from day one, so each one removed from the population early serves to make the older population that bit scarcer from his cohort, and further skews the sex ratio in favour of female to male, the more you manage the does the better the males tend to do (but don’t let the lady in your life hear you say this out loud!).

 

[Polar Lynx]

Actually, it is not very difficult to find an animal's real age via the enamel layers added on a tooth. One layer = one year but add 1 year because a deer will drop their milk teeths after year 1.
A practical way is to remove the jaw and then cook it or just let it dry for some tine. Then either work with the jaw as it is or pull out one of the front molars and then work out a cut with a diamond cutting disk and the Dremel. Does not take any fancy microscope to see and count the layers. A good handheld magnifying glass will do.
When several layers about then each layer (dark) can be heightend with a pencil for eaiser counting.